Cat’s Cradle (6)

Grupo BanRara perform a traditional ribbon maypole dance from Guantanamo, Cuba.
The tradition of maypole dancing in Guantanamo came from Haiti via France where maypole dancing was in style in the 18th century as an art dance. The origins of maypole dancing may have began in ancient Babylon during sex worship and fertility rites.

The men dance around one maypole and the women dance around another until a cat’s cradle is intricately woven between them and the dance becomes more frenzied and the two become one.

Frames of reference

Cat’s Cradle (2)

At the beginning of Stan Brakhage’s filmmaking career, he read all the writings of Sergei Eisenstein he could locate, and this dense montage film is one result. A record of an encounter between Brakhage, Jane, and their friends James Tenney and Carolee Schneemann, it intercuts fragments of each with a cat, floral wallpaper, an embroidered fabric. The figures, the cat, and inanimate objects are made to collide with each other, but they also seem to mysteriously commingle, almost as if alchemically transforming themselves into each other, people becoming objects and animals, and inanimate things seemingly becoming human.

Frames of reference

The Flowers That Did In Eden Bloom

Chris_Kenny_Eden

In a series of painstakingly constructed works using found materials Chris Kenny examines and muses on the notion of Paradise: our attempt to define it, build it, reach it or perhaps remember it. Rows of little wooden houses built from abandoned amateur landscape paintings are incised with the names of ideal worlds: Arcadia, Elysium, Utopia. They poignantly demonstrate the common desire to make a heaven on earth, a perfect garden, a harmonious society.

Chris Kenny’s exhibition is at Pitzhanger Manor Gallery, 26 April – 11 May 2014. More details here.

Frames of reference

Jenny Franklin At Kensington Place

001

At the beginning of April we installed ten paintings by Jenny Franklin at Kensington Place restaurant, the latest incarnation of their Art Wall series of exhibitions. There are two oil paintings on linen and eight framed watercolours on paper. Continue reading “Jenny Franklin At Kensington Place”

Frames of reference

Art For Cure

DSCF2618

Art for Cure is an exhibition I am involved in along with over 50 other artists. It’s going to be a really exciting exhibition and it’s raising money for Breakthrough Breast Cancer. It takes place at Bredfield House, near Woodbridge in Suffolk, on 3rd-5th May. Please visit the Art for Cure site for more details.

Jelly Green / The Rowley Gallery

Frames of reference