INTERFACE
Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
REVIEW
Gavin McClafferty: Horizontal Column
Meantime, Cheltenham
25-26 August
Reviewed by: James Fisher
“Thrift is the really romantic thing. Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.”
G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World, 1910.
Gavin McClafferty was the second resident artist at Meantime. His project, Horizontal Column, epitomised the joy to be had from art made through the transformation of humble or reclaimed things. The unadorned nature of this undertaking highlighted the poetry of materials: their mass and their interaction with gravity, their fragility and their transience. Through his negotiation with a suspended bridge of salvaged doors, McClafferty strove to remind us of these qualities within ourselves.
Meantime project space is on two floors: on the ground floor, McClafferty installed a number of small sculptural pieces as a kind of hors d’oeuvre to the main event upstairs. One of these works, 2007 Bliss, put me in mind of a performance by the New York-based anti-folk singer Barry Bliss that had taken place earlier that week in Cheltenham. Bliss introduced himself: “Nothing clever about me”, but his songs, like McClafferty’s sculpture, walked a heartfelt tightrope between politics and poetry. If by ‘clever’ Bliss meant ‘contrived’, then he acutely described the simple, lo-fi means by which McClafferty conjures his quietly seething forces.
The previous resident artist at Meantime, Helen Hardaker, had employed a similarly deceptively simple approach to the space. I remember a dog, weaving itself between people’s legs at the opening, surrounded by Hardaker’s exquisite line drawings of the self-same dog.
Just as the resident artists have worked by allowing their materials to run free, Sarah B, the coordinator of Meantime, is helping to provide artists with the freedom to thoughtfully develop. It is a rare opportunity, devised by someone who, as an artist, understands the need for time and space.
Writer detail:
James Fisher, an artist, is represented by the Eagle Gallery, London.
Venue detail:
Meantime Space
Oxford Passage, off St Margaret Road, CHELTENHAM GL50 4EF
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