Beast catalogue by Tonbridge School

BEAST XX

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Cover image: Mark Fairnington Prodigy 2008 oil on panel 50cm diameter

Like many children my first awareness of animals was through the soft toys I was given to console me. Later I was given a pet rabbit which seemed like a natural progression. However, it was after my rabbit was eaten by a fox and I vowed I would never eat rabbit myself, that I got an inkling of how complex our relationship with animals really is. It has been suggested that children find animals a natural metaphor for themselves because neither can use language or have an upright posture. However, this is something that as adults we learn to reject, and we create a distance between ourselves and the animal world. Except in relation to the ‘pet’, to the extent that we might even ask whether the pet is an animal at all. Treated as part of the family it may have crossed the species line and shifted from object to subject. This line becomes the most blurred in relation to the rabbit, the only animal in western culture that can smoothly relocate from our home to our plate. Beast explores the many contradictions within our relationship with animals and invites us to question our unconscious assumptions, thoughts and feelings. The artists examine the ordering strategies invented to think about animals in an urban, western, capitalist society. Some highlight the use of language to create different categories for animals according to their distance from the human, such as ‘pet’, ‘livestock’, ‘game’ and ‘wild animal’. They enable us to see that these boundaries are not fixed and it is when they are transgressed that we become aware of their purpose. Other artists in Beast remind us how much animals are part of our visual and oral culture - in stories, folklore and film. They help us to reflect upon the differences between us and them, our desire to communicate and attempts to bridge the unknowable divide. All of the artists use keen observation, humour and astonishing techniques to seduce us into examining what can sometimes be uncomfortable territory. I would like to thank all of the artists for taking part and creating this wonderful menagerie in the heart of Tonbridge School. Many thanks too to Chris Fite-Wassilak for his essay that successfully evokes the experience of encountering the artworks while fluently interweaving the ideas that connect them. And finally to the brilliant team of support staff within the school and gallery, upon which the success of the exhibitions depends. Emily Glass Curator

STAGED ENCOUNTERS BY CHRIS FITE-WASSILAK

Upstairs, in the monolithic building of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, one floor is given over entirely to a series of portals. The rooms are dimmed, while light emanates from the portals, each a framed view of a momentary scene frozen in time. In one, a moose that has been killed by an arrow stretches on barren ground, a vulture perched on top of the corpse ready to feast. In another, a bald eagle, perched on a riverbed stone trying to eat a spindly king crab, looks over its shoulder at a family of brown bears hovering eagerly nearby. Bits of trees and brush stand by like props, with each scene backdropped by a painted landscape that gives the impression of wilderness stretching off into the distance. There is no glass that separates us from these scenes, but their baited theatricality makes it implicitly known that this is an impossible excerpt of sorts, a stolen glimpse from the outdoor world, that is not to be transgressed or touched. The animals, doubly deceased and stuffed, are to remain in those poses for decades, if not centuries. The diorama is a common feature from late 19th and early 20th century natural history museums in the Western world. At a point when public museums were establishing themselves as a means for audiences to supposedly access the wider world, these mock-ups of ‘natural’ scenes were a way for urbanites to experience the textures and scale of, say, a lion, a crocodile, a tiger. The origins of the Carnegie Museum’s diorama collection, still one of the largest in the US, is also indicative of wider issues and the paradoxes that inform our approach to the ‘natural’. Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish steel magnate who made his millions processing and producing cheap steel for transportation, building and armaments, first got the idea for founding a natural history museum from a less educational endeavour: ‘While ordering a tiger-skin rug in Singapore, Carnegie struck up a conversation with a taxidermist who had just returned from a four-month adventure in Borneo collecting orangutans for a museum.’ His interest in the decorative, taxidermied version of the animal kingdom eventually blossomed into the museum’s display.

Theory of Mind 4 Nicky Coutts 2018 laser print on Japanese paper

The practice of creating dioramas has decreased dramatically since the 1950s, as museums sought other ways to involve audiences, and the practice came to be seen as out-dated and ineffective. But it’s interesting to note that the form was always fraught with tension: one study, exploring correspondence and disputes within museums in the 1920s and 30s notes, ‘many scientists – in and out of the museum – believed museum administrator’s commitment to habitat dioramas symbolized the erosion of the larger scientific mission of natural history museums.’ In other words, dioramas represented what those working in natural history museums saw as the gap between science, and the research they were carrying out, and the public-facing displays of such research. Even in their supposed heyday, the diorama was regarded as an oversimplified representation of animals, an exaggerated fiction. But that problem perhaps explains some of their enduring attraction: they stage our encounter with other animal species as one that is forced, frozen, fictionalised. Which is perhaps an accurate reflection. Back in the Carnegie Museum, further down from the larger dioramas is a hallway of smaller displays of stuffed and mounted birds. Perhaps dwelling on this fiction, one museum employee evidently took it upon themselves to stage a small intervention: in one cabinet, on a shelf next to a prone, bright yellow canary, is a plastic toy of the cartoon canary Tweety Bird. Just below them is a mounted geococcyx californianus, with a plush version of its cartoon counterpart leaning next to it, the wide-eyed and purpleplumed Roadrunner. The toys’ placement seemed a light and macabre joke on first pass, but the ironies and paradoxes continued to work on me long after I encountered them. Perhaps this is where we are now: caught somewhere between an embalmed 19th century embodiment of knowledge, killing animals in order to own them as specimens of study, and their wildly unrealistic animated counterparts, who rehearse their flighty immortality in endlessly repeated episodes. Both somehow hold an aspect of humanity’s view of the world. But between them is also the question: if most of our encounters with other animals, whether in a museum or a zoo or in a cage or on a screen, are fiction, why don’t we write another story, another version of that fiction? It’s into this uneasy territory, between the deadly and the absurd, that the exhibition ‘Beast’ wades. Humans staging and re-staging their encounters with other animals through art has been a thousands year old practice, from the very first cave paintings of deer and bison and up through Marcel Broodthaers’s audio work Interview With a Cat (1970) (‘Do you think it is a good painting?’ he asks. ‘Meeeow,’ comes the eventual reply). ‘Art thinks, and invites us to think, the other, and does this in ways that are other. In doing so, it contributes to expanding the humanities beyond the human,’ writer Filipa Ramos states. But the intricacies and pitfalls of how we think the other is set out though ‘Beast’. Bringing together five artists’ recent work across painting, sculpture, drawing and video, what becomes immediately apparent in the exhibition is that we will not simply be looking at animals. Dozens of pairs of eyes stare back at your as soon as you enter the gallery: the even, considered look from a cow from Mark Fairnington’s circular painting Prodigy (2011); the sidelong, almost dismissive glance from the gorilla in Nicky Coutts’s black and white print Theory of Mind 4 (2018); the hard,

Face Monkey Mark Fairnington 2012 oil on panel

sceptical wide-eyed glare from Laura Ford’s waist-high, pipe-wielding feline sculpture Mottled Cat (2019). These each have their own approach and appraisals, but within such a tangled web of looks it’s clear that we should watch our step, negotiate things carefully, and perhaps keep some of our normal judgements in check. Here, the fiction of our animal encounters is under examination from all sides. Although in a range of media, what unites the works that form ‘Beast’ is a desire to document this shifting and contested territory of humanity’s relationship to other animals. Most of the artworks here rely on photography or video as the basis for their explorations, as if needing to prove the reality of what’s in front of us, and to capture our desire for proximity. Kay Walsh’s video All His Rights (2019) revolves around attempts to get close to the deer of Exmoor National Park. Functioning as a documentary, the video charts her visits over the course of a year. What we are given instead of shots of the deer are primarily shots of the landscape, and the opinions of one of the deerstalkers who helps look after the deer. He describes his burgeoning relationships with the animals, as they become accustomed to him; all the while, the camera occasionally follows a stag from a marked distance. Threaded through the film is the paradox of the phrase ‘animal management’; that these deer are kept within the boundaries of a designated forest area, and culled and cultivated to be ‘wild’ only within that boundary. In the video’s apparent climax, the camera succeeds in getting closer to one stag, an animal with singular antlers that arc up in a slender, simple ‘U’; though in a telling footnote, the artist has described how the deerstalker remarked after their sighting that, due to the animal’s un-ornate antlers, it should be put down. The paintings of Mark Fairnington pose a closer and seemingly more intimate encounter with other species. In the middle of the gallery is a bull: a full-scale, bulking white, bristling bull, giving us a doleful eye. The large painting Maerdy Tally (2010) leans on the floor, placing us at the same starting point so we know how we measure up to the beast. Fairnington’s paintings of animals, with a photorealistic edge to them, sit somewhere between a staged portrait and a wary still life, often capturing the unlikely vitality of long-dead taxidermied animals. In the painting Eye Monkey (2018), we are given a close look at a small, brown monkey, but its body is covered entirely in translucent plastic, its glint and sheen hiding many of the furry details beneath. Just at its right eye does it come close enough to the plastic sheeting to be terribly clear: one hard look out directly at us. It becomes apparent that this is a posed, stuffed example, housed under a dust sheet for storage purposes. But the look retains its power to ask any number of questions – not least, why do we do such things? Looking up close to such an image, that depicts in turn a specimen from a museum, we might also ask: What is the price of such intimacy? What we’re really seeing up close is our own crafts of capturing and preserving some puppet of the formerly living, rather than any proximity to the animal itself. What’s really on display is our own desire to capture and hold these creatures. The dreams and unspoken wishes of this desire seem to be embodied in the sculptures of Laura Ford. Whether the shy, pyjama-wearing elephant Bedtime Boy (2013), with its ears, face and trunk made out of folds of grey cloth, or the smug frowns of the Mottled Cat and Stripey

See Nature Nicky Coutts 2018 charcoal on paper

Cat I (2019), it seems this is the point in the exhibition when the cartoon reality starts to take over. These anthropomorphised hybrid creatures seem to come from a fantastical place where animals take on human faces and postures, as if sprung to life from countless parables and childhood stories of talking, gesturing animals. But they are here in the room with us, we can’t deny their solid existence. The Three Bears (2017) make an unlikely procession, one smaller bear playing a drum, the next clanging together cymbals, maybe leading us towards some jolly picnic or fete. Behind all this fun personified in Ford’s creatures is the suggestion that animals really are just like us, we can understand them in the same way we might someone who lives next door. But the largest bear leading the march has other things in mind, his hollow eyes sternly dead-set, leaning forward like a trench-coated gangster and pointing a handgun at us. Projecting our fantasies into animals is not without its risks, he seems to warn: Don’t push me. Perhaps best to keep a respectful distance – advice that might best be taken in dealing with all creatures, real or imagined. Nearby, a giant fly is doing the spring cleaning. Or maybe it’s an ant, some kind of human-sized insect with a long nose and arms, humming contentedly to itself while it irons a cloth that it then uses to clean a set of veranda doors. The creatures that populate Edwina Ashton’s videos and animations seem to spring from the same hybrid dimension as Ford’s, perhaps slightly more hastily assembled out of foam, cleaning brushes and bits of old clothes, and here it’s as if we’re watching a documentary of their humdrum domestic lives. The elephant of In the Winter Hours (2016) leafs through a dictionary, mumbling and grumbling around the house, until their child comes tugging at their sleeve, to then walk through the snow to watch a parade. An entire lifetime of aspirations and regrets is squeezed into the two and a half minutes of So Much Potential (2005), where two of these giant insect creatures mooch around a conservatory. The one called John, pacing nervously around, entertains great visions of cultivating his visiting nephew, Rupert, as a dancer. Rupert, clueless to such grandiose schemes, simply plays blithely with John’s prize plant. John deserts his plans in a fit of melancholia, giving up on the insect-boy before he has even started. The absurdity of their bric-a-brac mutant bodies only plays up the poignancy of the tale, as comedy giant bugs with very human problems. It becomes a different kind of cautionary tale: when we imaginatively inhabit another, we inevitably bring our problems and emotional baggage with us. Perhaps, though, it’s the insistence on the terms of encounter with the other that perpetuates humanity’s distance from the rest of animals. We idealise wildness and animality, and fetishize the distinctions, the weirdness while still maintaining a belief in the superiority of language, of only humanity being capable of abstract thinking. Perhaps, the drawings of Nicky Coutts suggest, we should be looking for different kinds of animal imagination, different terms of engagement and communication. While starting from the sign language gestures learned by Koko the gorilla, Coutts’s 2018 Man Stupid series began to stray away from a direct depiction of Koko, or any known animal for that matter. The gorillas gestures themselves began to suggest other gestures, away from the language we tried to teach them. What emerges in See Nature I and See Nature 2 are mounds of hair, almost formless piles and parts, taut at points as if still growing a limb, as if parts of a proto-being in formation. The fragments of these

tufts seem somehow independent, on the way to shaping its own consciousness, a hybrid projection of human and gorilla. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Beastâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; presents a sort of kaleidoscopic diorama of frozen animal moments. But what it reveals is more unsettling. The human relationship to other animals is a set of encounters that can never be settled; it has to be continually staged and re-staged. While we might enlist any number of truisms of how humans are animal too, the challenge is more basic, more instinctual, in learning to not just think as another form of animal, but to imagine and create with the other, way beyond the diorama or the cartoon. We must learn to stage these encounters on different terms and terrains, conditions that we wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be able or even know how to set. The imaginary half-formed animal of Man Stupid points uncertainly towards another direction, where animals together might co-imagine new fictions, new beasts.

ARTISTS Edwina Ashton Nicky Coutts Mark Fairnington Laura Ford Kay Walsh

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Credits

Edwina Ashton Edwina Ashton uses animals or the anthropomorphic to explore human emotions in films, performances, drawings and installations. Attempting interactions that fail or flounder, her creatures are made of the flimsiest of materials and are often flawed or seemingly vulnerable. She is particularly interested in exploring social behaviour such as embarrassment and isolation. Her films in Beast are animations using hand drawn imagery of strange animals in the landscape and films depicting bizarre hybrid creatures acting in very human ways. They reflect her interest in zoology and our perceptions of nature and are enchanting, humorous and quietly moving. So Much Potential features two strange creatures in a greenhouse tending a dead tree stump. Described by Ashton as “weavils, or possibly George is an aphid” they are created from everyday materials including an old quilted sleeping bag and pieces of foam piping. The voice-over describes how they are very proud of their recently acquired plant and have also invested time in Rupert, a real but dead cockchafer who has come to visit. The disparity between the eloquence of the voice-over, the creatures’ high expectations and cultural references, and the roughly hewn materials creates a funny but also poignant situation. Ashton has exhibited extensively internationally and in the UK; the latter includes Camden Arts Centre, the Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Britain, the Jerwood Space, Tintype and the Barbican Art Gallery in London.

EDWINA ASHTON

So Much Potential 2005 video still

Pond from In the Winter Hours 2016 HD video still

EDWINA ASHTON

Lake from In the Winter Hours 2016 HD video still

Nicky Coutts Nicky Coutts’ practice explores the ways in which humans and animals may create meaningful exchanges as they attempt to understand each other. Beast features her large scale charcoal drawings from the Man Stupid series, inspired by Koko the Gorilla who had been taught sign language by her trainer and used it to communicate with the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. Her signs included ‘Man Stupid’ ‘Fix Nature’ and ‘Nature See You’ and can be used to demonstrate that the cognitive difference between animals and humans is arguably far smaller than is often assumed. The drawings in the series become increasingly abstract suggesting that interspecies communication is both complex and fraught with difficulty. The piece Thought Sequence uses the same abstract imagery but is derived from drawings on tracing paper in the artist’s sketchbook, so it was possible to see the next drawing when looking at the one on top. She has described it as being like a “conveyor belt of images….like thinking, or memory, that you’re haunted by something perhaps, and it comes slowly through from the back.” The film All Rise was made after a year spent with drama students learning to be animals and reflects the artist’s fascination with mimicry. All of the sound track is produced by mimics; the human sounds are produced by animals and the animal sounds by humans. Nicky Coutts is represented by Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art. She is a Research Tutor and Reader in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art. Her work has been shown internationally at venues including Kunsthalle Mainz, Germany, Fotografisk Center Copenhagen, Youkobo Artspace, Tokyo and China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China. www.nickycoutts.com

NICKY COUTTS

All Rise 2015 HD video stills

NICKY COUTTS

Left: Thought Sequence 2019 inkjet prints 21.7 x 21cm

Above: Man Stupid 2018 charcoal on paper 100 x 150cm

Mark Fairnington Mark Fairnington’s practice explores the links between art and science. His paintings in Beast are the outcome of his investigations into the natural history collections in museums and the ways their specimens are housed, stored and displayed. Fairnington strategically adopts a style which approaches photorealism in order to engage his audience. But his paintings are in fact composed from collages of a large number of different photographs, thereby blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. “The idea of scientific correctness is one of the things that the work asks questions about. At the centre of my research is the idea that observation is never neutral and that the cultural meaning of the images generated by scientific research is often determined by narratives that lie outside the field. I’m interested in how description, its attention to detail, gained through studied and intense observation, becomes a platform for storytelling, speculation and even fantasy.”* His paintings of eyes from the Creatures series, include the reflections of the room in which the animal is housed. They entice us to think about the way these animals are collected and stored and sometimes include the artist himself. The round shape emphasises the painting as an object, separate from its architectural surroundings, which like the animals can be possessed. This form was partly inspired by a nineteenth century round brooch with a painted eye that the artist saw in Harris Museum. Fairnington has worked with the Horniman Museum, Imperial War Museum, Natural History Museum and Wellcome Collection in London, and exhibited widely in the UK and Europe. He is a Reader and Senior Lecturer in Painting at the University of the Arts, London. www.markfairnington.com * Mark Fairnington interviewed by Shelly Stein “The Specimen”, Antennae issue 6, Summer 2008, p61.

MARK FAIRNINGTON

Prodigy 2008 oil on panel 50cm diameter

Minotaur 2013 oil on panel 60cm diameter

MARK FAIRNINGTON

Maerdy Tally 2009 oil on canvas 235 x 367cm

Laura Ford Laura Ford has cited influences on her work from high and low culture as diverse as the fairground she grew up on, the Catholic convent school she attended with its statues of saints and virgins, her grandparents farm and later zoo, sculptures of Hindu gods adorned by worshippers, films by Fellini, Cocteau and Lynch, and contemporary dance and politics. Her figurative sculptures remind us of familiar childhood toys and fairy stories; they combine elements that are endearing with more disturbing dream like associations. They often suggest the vulnerability of children in danger of loss, harm or failure. The making process is an important part of her practice and Ford has been working with textiles and ceramics since the beginning of her career. Her sculpture’s hand sewn outfits give us clues to their identity, sometimes appearing more like costume than ordinary clothes. She has described them as “sculptures dressed as people dressed as animals.” “Her freestanding figures carry a logical fiction about them that allows a sense that something secret is being acted out and upon. Poetic space might surround the work, the context is important, and yet not essential…private yet open, these animals of the night, borrowers from fiction are living a parallel existence before us.”* Ford has exhibited internationally including at Turner Contemporary, the Venice Biennale (representing Wales) British Art Show and numerous exhibitions in Europe. Her work is held in collections including Tate, the V&A, Arts Council and Contemporary Art Society and is visible in a wide range of public commissions. * Sasha Craddock, 2016

www.lauraford.net

LAURA FORD

Mottled Cat 2019 jesmonite and steel 90 x 26 x 26cm

Three Bears 2017 Bronze 160 x 160 x 50cm 130 x 110 x 45cm 90 x 65 x 38cm edition of 1/6

LAURA FORD

Bedtime Boy 2013 Patinated and painted bronze 115 x 47 x 41cm edition 2/5

Kay Walsh Kay Walsh uses video, photography, text and sound to draw attention to details within specific landscapes. In her films she uses the devices of slow movement and slow looking to explore ideas about nature, landscape and the stories that exist within places. Both of her recent films, Blue Hills filmed in the Scottish Highlands and All His Rights filmed in the West Country, take the viewer on a journey in search of something that is not easily seen or found. All His Rights is the result of a year-long research project on Exmoor National Park working closely with the National Trust Deer Stalker on the Holnicote Estate. It examines the human animal relationship. Walsh wrote that: “Red deer in the wild are hard to get close to but it is the emotional connection and passion surrounding them that is almost harder to unravel. They divide a community and a country as to the best way to protect them. Through a series of interviews and being in the landscape listening to local concerns I began to explore these themes. From ancient hunting grounds on Exmoor to the popularity of encountering stags in the wild, the deer have always been an important part of the landscape. However, its future is now part of a much greater debate about sustainability, re-wilding and animal protection.” Walsh’s photographs in the exhibition are a response to the stables built by Sir Dyke Acland (1752-1794) 9th Baronet at the Holnicote Estate on Exmoor. The stables house a collection of thirty stag heads which were hunted by the Devon and Somerset Staghounds between 1787-1793. Walsh has exhibited in New Zealand and the UK, most recently at Southwark Park Gallery and Studio 1.1 in London. www.kaywalsh.com

KAY WALSH

Stable, Holnicote Estate, National Trust 2019 c-type on aluminium 75 x 50cm

Head, Holnicote Estate, National Trust 2019 c-type on aluminium 75 x 50cm

KAY WALSH

All His Rights 2019 HD video Film Still

OBS Gallery Tonbridge School High Street Tonbridge Kent TN9 1JP 01732 365555 obsgallery@tonbridge-school.org www.oldbigschoolgallery.co.uk Published to accompany the exhibition: BEAST OBS Gallery, 17 January – 23 February 2020 Curated by Emily Glass Edited by Emily Glass Proofread by Kim Jacobson Designed by Michael Lenz at Draught Vision Ltd aka D/VISION Published by OBS Gallery Images © the artists

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Large scale drawings of a gorilla using sign language to communicate, a 5ft sculpture of an elephant boy standing awkwardly in pyjamas and a round oil painting depicting a minotaur’s eye in exquisite detail, come together in Beast to remind us that our relationship with animals is both complex and conflicted. The artists in Beast reflect upon the frameworks we create to distance ourselves from other creatures- we collect, document, display, categorise, eat and breed them yet we are also enticed to understand them in very human ways: animals have human emotions and thoughts in books, cartoons and films and our pets are ‘part of the family’. Using photography, painting, sculpture, drawing and film, the artists explore the human/animal divide. They use their skills to seduce us and humour to disarm us, enticing us to question our assumptions and beliefs. Beast features work by the artists: Edwina Ashton Nicky Coutts Mark Fairnington Laura Ford Kay Walsh

ISBN: 978-1-9999434-3-2