Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
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Jamie Shovlin, ‘Plate 4 - Evil Bastard the Magpie (after Archibald Thorburn, 1915)’, dimensions variable, 2004-6.
from The Birds in her Garden, pencil, pencil crayon on paper, book pages, handwritten index, specimen pins, entomology cabinet, taxidermy birds, ornithology books
The City Gallery, Leicester
3 June – 8 July
Reviewed by: S Mark Gubb
“I am convinced that natural selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive, means of modification.”
We read this on one of hundreds of pages of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, mounted and hung on the walls of the gallery. This is all we can read on that page as the artist has carefully deleted all but this sentence from the page, using a black marker pen.
The decision to isolate this sentence is not as arbitrary as it may sound. Shovlin has pored over second-hand copies of this book, deleting everything other than those sentences and phrases that have been bracketed, underlined or marked out in some way by the book’s previous owner. In doing so he has created an edited text of the book; everything we need to know about The Origin of Species according to these unknown readers.
In Shovlin’s solo exhibition ‘Aggregate’ there’s a sense that you’ve walked in on a body of research. The set up is reminiscent of half-lit natural history displays, with mounted texts and frames containing images of birds, surrounded by information pertaining to their habitat, habits and geographical locations.
Each piece of textbook information is cross-referenced to a shelf of amateur ornithology books; all except one. A piece of hand-written text in each frame tells us more about these birds than the books could ever hope to: “Starling – starting to nest in the eaves next door”, and “Wood Pigeon – plod around the garden”. A video work of a small bird of prey devouring its catch in an urban backyard has the observations and musings of the artist’s mother playing over the top. We discover that blue tits “take 1,000 trips a day when they’re building their nest”.
Slowly, this formal display takes on a very human quality as we realise that everything here is drawing on the knowledge of the amateur. From the studious folk, underlining passages of Darwin’s seminal text, to Shovlin’s mother’s observations about the birds in her backyard, this is a collation of hours, if not years, of other people’s time and study.
Shovlin’s gathering of this information manages to amuse without ever being patronising. We’re left feeling that this is a celebration of the amateur passion, a genuine interest leading to an informed, grounded, knowledge. Where books can tell us the facts, an observer can bring them to life. The relationship between the deleted text and the observations of his mother becomes about a human contact. The world is full of information for us to interpret and learn from, but it’s when someone else offers us a point of view that it becomes really engaging.
Writer detail:
Mark Gubb is an artist. www.smarkgubb.com
smarkgubb@hotmail.com |
www.smarkgubb.com
Venue detail:
Leicester City Art Gallery
90 Granby Street, Leicester LE1 1DJ
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