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The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Donald Locke review – ‘Incredible, powerful, uncomfortable, shocking'
Donald Locke looked at all the formal aesthetic experimentation of the 1950s and 60s, all the minimalism and modernism and abstract expressionism, and thought: 'Hold on. There's something missing here. Something big.' The three grim, heavy, black monochromatic paintings that greet you as you walk into this show, called Resistant Forms, at Spike Island, the first major retrospective of the Guyanese-British artist's work in the UK, have all the hallmarks of minimalism. They are dark, simple, ultra-formal images, a single colour on each canvas, covered in geometric grids, like Bauhaus in mourning. But the shapes and grids that define each work are not just experiments in form, they are not just an artist trying to push aesthetic boundaries: each is based on the architecture of the plantation. Suddenly, this formal minimalism becomes heavily weighed down by history, exploitation and oppression. Now, those formal geometric structures look like fields of sugar cane, bodies packed too close together in cramped dorms, sweaty and suffering. Fur peeks out of a metal grate cut into one of the canvases, as if countless animals are pressed in there, caged. They are incredible, powerful, uncomfortable, shocking paintings. Amazingly, Locke, who died in 2010, at first rejected any political reading of the works, insisting they were just exercises in form. It wasn't until years later that he realised how overburdened with the pain of colonialism the works really were. Taking the language of art and imbuing it with the reality of the colonial experience is a move that Locke would repeat over and over. In the 1960s, he came to Bath and Edinburgh to study ceramics. The black sculptures that resulted are like splayed bodies, pairs of lungs spread apart, muscles locked in tension. In the 70s, the ceramic shapes elongate – now they look like long, downtrodden, browbeaten, solemn figures arranged into grids and locked in cages in sculptures titled Plantation K-140 and Plantation Piece. The brutality of the plantation as a tool of colonial greed, control and subjugation is everywhere. The most famous piece here, Trophies of Empire from the Tate's collection, is a series of long black cylinders placed in vases and cups, some shackled together, others encased in silver, all displayed in a bleak wunderkammer of colonial violence. He was pretty insistent that these cylinders were bullets, not penises, but either way the result is the same: the colonies get screwed while the colonisers get rich. The mixing of media – in that case, ceramics and found objects – would happen throughout the rest of his career. Later paintings, from when he had moved to Arizona and then Atlanta, combine vast abysses of black paint with photos of confederate soldiers, skulls, Queen Victoria, white nudes and black singers. There are even photos of his own old work. Throughout, the past loops inescapably back into the present. He was a maximalist, smashing together painting and ceramics, modernism and African-Caribbean mythology, sculpture and photography, ideas upon ideas upon ideas. Some of the ceramic works get a little dull and repetitive, and the later reinterpretation of Trophies of Empire isn't great. But the canvases are highly successful, powerfully dark, ultra-critical, vast, angry things. Locke was at the forefront of a disparate group of diasporic artists dragging modern art into the post-colonial future. Alongside people including Frank Bowling and Aubrey Williams, Locke used his work to say: 'Hey, you can't separate art from history, from context.' Painting and sculpture in the post-colonial era is haunted, stalked by colonialism. To ignore that is to ignore the truth. He could no more make art unaffected by those things than he could ignore his own race, his own family history, his own past. The most striking thing is how current the work looks. Decades before colonialism, blackness and post-colonial rhetoric became one of the dominant themes of contemporary art, Locke was laying out a roadmap for how art could confront uncomfortable histories and create something beautiful in the process. Donald Locke: Resistant Forms is at Spike Island, Bristol, 31 May to 7 September
The Guardian
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Delightful and disgusting – Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures and Caroline Walker: Mothering review
You'd be hard pressed to find a more alluring opening to a show than this: a bubbling pool consisting of 800kg of molten milk chocolate oozing seductively, filling the gallery with a sweet aroma and a soft, steady gurgling. On the walls brightly coloured, circular photographs of orchids, gerberas, sweet peas and chrysanthemums repeat the circular shape of the chocolate pool. But for artist Helen Chadwick – whose Life Pleasures show at the Hepworth Wakefield is the largest retrospective of her work – pleasure is never that far from pain. It is not long before that thick, gloopy chocolate starts to smell sickly, the scent overwhelming the senses; the mechanism inside making the liquid bubble artificially. On closer inspection, the petals in the photographs are suspended in a variety of less pleasant liquids – industrial hand cleaner, window spray, washing up liquid – and the suggestive shapes of tonsils, testes and vaginas begin to emerge. This push and pull – the delightful and the disgusting – is found throughout Chadwick's practice. In Carcass, a huge, colourful column of rotting food taken from the Hepworth cafe fizzes and disintegrates; in Loop My Loop a glossy lock of hair is intertwined with a pig's intestines; in Piss Flowers urine is used to create beautiful, organic blooms, and in Agape a glistening pair of tonsils glow through a lightbox to gory effect. The artist uses an unusual array of materials to elicit responses in her audience. She wants us to feel not think. She taps into our subconscious, into our feelings of desire, asking us to probe why a furry table or a pile of juicy worms simultaneously attracts and repels. Chadwick's MA degree show in 1977, In the Kitchen, bought her early acclaim and the images of women dressed as kitchen appliances still feel relevant. In the two subsequent decades, Chadwick was prolific, and despite her untimely death at 42, Life Pleasures is a celebration of a full and mature practice. The show categorises pieces under headings such as Feminism and Fetish, The Self as Subject and Landscapes of the Body to bring Chadwick's interests to the fore. In the Kitchen and many other works in the exhibition often appear in 'women artist' group shows, but Life Pleasures demonstrates the impact of Chadwick's practice when seen as a whole and highlights her ability to take classical concepts, tip them sideways, inject humour and produce something relatable and enticing. The autobiographical projects Chadwick produced aged 30, Ego Geometria Sum: the Labours, saw her create 10 sculptures from significant moments in her childhood and then take photographs of her carrying each sculpture. In the exhibition, the sculptures are in the centre of a space with the 10 photographs on pink walls, separated by long, shiny pink curtains. The photographs – the Labours – are named after the Greek myth in which Hercules was ordered to perform 12 perilous tasks and Chadwick completes her own tasks by lifting or holding her sculptures. This demonstrates strength but her contorted body also symbolises the way in which these moments from her past have shaped her. The most impressive work is The Oval Court, originally made for Chadwick's first major solo exhibition at the ICA in London in 1986. Across the floor is a low platform in a soft blue, covered in 12 photocopied images of her body as she folds around animals, food, fauna and an eclectic selection of objects. Five gold balls shimmer on the surface of the 'ocean' of Chadwicks, and on the wall 11 columns drawn from St Peter's Basilica are topped by Chadwick's weeping face. The columns and the gold are regal, while Chadwick's nude body gorging on food and wrapped up in random materials celebrates humanity enjoying earthly pleasures. Opening at the same time is Caroline Walker's Mothering, an exhibition that sits neatly alongside Life Pleasures, not least because mothering is almost the embodiment of pleasure and pain. But there are other satisfying links, such as Walker's own self-portrait where – unlike Chadwick – she is not holding a childhood moment but a child who will shape her just as much. And like Chadwick, Walker is interested in the experience of women; she has spent many years painting women at work. Mothering captures her time spent observing a maternity unit at UCL hospital, London, and her own personal experiences. Motherhood is exquisitely observed by Walker, who manages to document the quiet, dark shuffle of the sonography suite; the hazy, repetitiveness of night feeds; the coffee table clutter and half-consumed glasses of water that plague a new mother's life. One of the largest pieces is Daphne, a painting of the artist's daughter as a toddler captured through the lounge window. It is dusk and the exterior of the house has a blue hue, but inside the lounge is awash with warm, orange light and home comforts. Daphne stands silently, perhaps anticipating the return of her mother who is on the other side of the window. The two are separate for a moment – two individuals in a big world – but even unseen by Daphne, Walker is watching over her. Neither are ever truly alone. In footage of Chadwick's degree performance of Domestic Sanitation, the viewers are predominantly men. On today's press trip it is entirely women, which hints at the success of work by artists such as Chadwick and Walker: if you allow women to be seen, if you focus on their desires, you make space for them to exist in the public consciousness. Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures and Caroline Walker: Mothering are at The Hepworth, Wakefield from 17 May until 27 October
