Exhibiting in London.

A rare opportunity to show work in London’s West End cropped up this week, as a result of the Covid pandemic having hit high street retail so hard. An empty shop on South Molton Street, just off Oxford St, was offered to the MA students at Farnham for free for a week. It’s in a beautiful eighteenth century building that was the birthplace of William Blake. The space has white walls and is unfurnished, with light and electricity, and only needed the floors cleaned and lettering removed from the window before we could get started installing our work.

The central London location did present the artists with a considerable transport challenge as vehicular access is extremely limited and parking impossibly expensive. Most work arrived on foot or by trolley having travelled into London on the train. The challenge was to be inventive with the work so that pieces were transportable but still big enough to make an impact. Rollable two dimensional work, and three dimensional work made with light weight components were opted for along with blocks of multiple framed pieces within one work.

The fourteen artists present work reflecting a common thread under the title Unsettled Focus. The proposal starts with a quote from John Berger:

“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled”

The work spans mixed media, installation, film, photography, sculpture, painting, collage and animation. It can be seen through a series of contextual lenses including future geology and the Anthropocene, our relationship with the machine and technological entanglements, place, the body and the home, the skin and its boundaries, soft dystopia and how we care.

The piece I chose to submit is titled SUV 745 and is a direct response to recreational vehicle use on Byway 745. A 7 metre roll of wallpaper printed with a tyre track image is attached to the wall at ceiling height to unroll across the floor and down a small step. Adjacent to the paper stands a stack of gabion baskets filled with parts from off-road vehicles that I have collected from Byway 745, and wing mirrors lie on the floor reflecting the viewer and the tyre track. It has been a great opportunity to test and document this new piece of work, not having had the space to really stand back from it up to now.

Happy accidents have also occurred with footprints from guests treading on the print during the opening leading me to think about using audience footprints on it for my final MA project.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the event was to have a proper opening, albeit with face masks, on a beautiful summer evening in central London.

Open Evening photographs by Li An Lee and Robyn Jacobs.