INTERFACE
Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
REVIEW
Margate Rocks 08
Festival of Contemporary Visual Art and Ecology
2-11 May
Reviewed by: Jessika Worrall
The ‘Margate Rocks’ festival is back with a bang following a three-year sabbatical. Do not expect Turneresque watercolours or paintings of fishing boats at sea, often associated with art in British seaside towns. Margate as a town is currently reinventing itself and this art event facilitates the potential and possibilities of such changes.
‘Margate Rocks’ uses twenty different venues, and addresses the theme of art and ecology through various media from street performance and music via drawings, photography, film and sculpture to workshops for families and late night talks. The festival showcases a wide range of diverse artists.
Displayed prominently on Margate’s promenade is a large poster by Jimmy Cauty: a photograph showing landmarks of Margate behind a mountain of waste. Immediate associations arise about the amount of rubbish we all produce. That some locals complained and even threatened one of the organisers about this piece seems laughable considering the seriousness of the subject matter. “This is not Art” has been scrawled in graffiti over the piece and shows clearly how art can be seen as provocative or even threatening, raising questions about its role in society.
Millie Burton’s digital C-type prints Home improvement (2007) depict household items such as televisions, old sinks, pots and cookers. The discarded items, arranged randomly, create a feeling of the familiar and a strange notion of sadness that everything is replaceable and comes to an end. There is a bizarre beauty in the composition of these items, metamorphosing into something outside their original function. Isolated and stark, they create a poetry of their own, quietly resonating the everyday.
Jeffery T Y Lee’s sixteen landscapes in ink on paper are wonderfully mature pieces. The eyes travel over the lines, closing the gap in between to ‘finish’ the image whilst somehow still opening up various stages of its representation. The work is reminiscent of the chora from Plato’s Timaeus, describing a place where matter emerges from form, perhaps the zone between an experience and its realisation. Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger calls it the matrix, seen as an additional concept. The pieces evoke a different language, more utterance and tone than its manifestation.
Sarah Craske and Stacy Keeler’s work The Women’s Land Army succeeds on multiple levels. It is a collaboration of research activity with the local community, council and archives creating site-specific performance and installation. Plants, edible flowers and seeds grown in artists’ studios are planted in places which were originally green areas, now redesigned for future development. The piece becomes a memorial to a greener past and the importance of these open spaces, while the research presentation of these spaces is being housed in the Shed museum of The Women’s Land Army workers, which is constructed from materials discovered in the local area. Their work addresses sustainable living whilst also developing an underlying notion of female gender. The perceived male domain of the garden shed becomes a dwelling of female achievement and transforms preconceived ideas into uneasy new possibilities.
Just a few steps away from this thought-provoking piece is another wooden structure housing a film Bristlecone by Rebecca Birch, shot on location in Big Pine, California: home of the world’s oldest trees. The shack is built on a small green space outside, modelled upon the workshop on one of the characters in the film. On first impression the piece suggests environmental issues, but on closer inspection the fifty-minute film is not merely about a particular landscape but how we discuss it and how landscape can filter into our being. We are taken on a journey, reminiscent of the work of the author W G Sebald where stories seem to unfold randomly, linking up by chance and where no singular truth is possible. The artist has already formed relationships with locals who have added their own stories, creating an interactive launch pad for the continuation of the project, involving Margate as a connective location. Rhizomatic in Deleuzian terms, it fuses the feel and experience of this diverse arts festival and leaves one in anticipation of 2009.
This is not art? Discover for yourself next year and be part of Margate’s future reinvention.
Writer detail:
Jessika Worrall is a practising international artist and freelance writer.
Venue detail:
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