House of Fairy Tales

HOUSE OF FAIRY TALES
UBS Openings: The Long Weekend 2009

Sarah Sparkes as Lady Never Afraid - bad luck to you if you listen to her stories.

Friday 22 May 2009, 12.00–18.00Saturday 23 May 2009, 12.00–18.00Sunday 24 May 2009, 12.00–18.00Monday 25 May 2009, 12.00–18.00

Take part in a series of workshops and activities for families and people of all ages as House of Fairy Tales take residency outside Tate Modern by the riverside. Make, do, explore and perform, whilst exploring themes and ideas generated by Arte Povera. Join in the exploration of material and process through activities such as sewing, drawing and sculpture; enter a witch’s gingerbread house and make crazy characters; make and play unusual instruments; explore silhouettes and shadow puppets; read all about Arte Povera and fairy tales in a travelling horsebox library called Pegasus; learn to dance around a maypole, in this unique celebration of homemade culture as an antidote to commercialism and an unmissable visual and aural feast. The House of Fairy Tales is a non profit production company, set up in 2007 by artists Gavin Turk and Deborah Curtis to produce large and small scale, national and local events celebrating and promoting creative education. They work with an expanding network of visual artists, theatre performers, musicians, as well as creative mathematicians, inventors, engineers and scientists to help equip the next generation with the imagination needed for their future on the planet. They work in public spaces and in partnership with other institutions in order to reach a wide range of groups, cultures and abilities. http://www.houseoffairytales.org/

MAY DAY: THE DARK TIMES (Editor’s Choice≠1)

'You are here' by Sarah Sparkes

coffin built to fit the artists and infinity box on trestel legs, 2006

Curated by Paul Sakoilsky, editor of The Dark Times
45 Robertson Street Hastings East Sussex TN34 1HL

Private View 6–9pm Friday 1 May 2009

Exhibition 2 May–12 June Wednesday–Sunday 11am–6pm
Contributing artists and writers for exhibition and publication:Petra Johanna Barfs Christine Binnie NoNose Cedric Christie Leigh Clarke Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly Andrew Cooper John Cussans Aidan Dunn Thomas Draschan Selena Godden Mark Hammond Richard Heslop Dick Jewell Dan Langton Dean Kenning Calum F Kerr Peter Lewis Lee Maezler Elizabeth Manchester Susana Medina Stephan Micalef Nasrin Montag Anne Charlotte Morgenstein Makiko Nagaya Richard Niman Derek Ogbourne Laura Oldfield Ford Sophie Parkin Mark O’Rorke Raul Pina Paul Renner Imogen O'Rorke Paul Sakoilsky Liam Scully Dallas Seitz Martin Sexton Bob and Roberta Smith Rose Smith Sarah Sparkes Gavin Turk Mike Watson Jürgen Wolfstädter

In 2007 Paul Sakoilsky started collecting London's free (and other) newspapers "from train, bus and street, editing the covers with paint and collage, adding, altering and deconstructing image and text to create a new periodical: The Dark Times. With the passage of time and the appearance of each succeeding cover this act of subversion has grown into an impressive body of work: at once satire and psycho-social investigation".At F-ISH gallery, the artist curates/edits ‘May Day: The Dark Times (Editor’s Choice≠1), the first extension of the project into the arena of curation. It will be an exhibition of essential works by international and emerging artists; many pieces exhibited for the first time. Whilst being fully respectful of individual works, the gallery will function as 'The Dark Times: Press Office≠3', an overall installation in which carefully chosen pieces will be set into dialogue. A further element will be the production of a special, first ever printed edition of The Dark Times, made up of commissioned work and text. This will be issued both as an affordable, standalone newsprint catalogue-paper, and as a limited boxed edition, with digital c-prints of selected pages.

Opening on May Day, a day on which Hastings town starts its Green Man celebrations the show runs over a 6-week period. The idea of May Day and Beltane is to be seen as an important conceptual framework, as a celebration of the international struggle for workers’ (human) rights, as much as for its ancient lineage as a celebration of fire, fertility and rebirth. The editor is interested in the alchemical-like power of discourse and art, akin to what critic and artist Dean Kenning terms 'Art-Energy', to question and to transform everyday struggle and materials.An editor's desk will be set up in the gallery from where Sakoilsky will periodically make a special edition in situ. From here, he will conduct symposia, inviting artists and thinkers from a variety of discourses, and the public to join an interdisciplinary purview of the times we are in, and where we might be heading. These will be published through the dark times podcasts and website set up for the project in collaboration with F-ISH's eco-hosted/solar-powered website.

Part of F-ISH gallery's Guest Curator Program.

REVIEW in Artvehicle by Lee Campbell

....guest-curated by Paul Sakoilsky, entitled MAY DAY MAY DAY: THE DARK TIMES, an extension of his The Dark Times newspaper, featuring an array of local, national and international talents with artists such as Leigh Clarke, Laura Oldfield Ford, Marco, Rose Smith, Calum F. Kerr, Bob and Roberta Smith, Gavin Turk and Dallas Seitz and others. The gallery's mission is to respond to local audiences and engage the local public with their own idiosyncratic concerns. This show is no exception in allowing a wide range of audiences to be able to enter into a dialogue with the work of pagan and ritualistic beauty. Highlights include Sarah Spark's plywood coffin ‘You Are Here’ 2006 and Liam Scully's ‘Fertility Spell’. Mark Hammond presents an installation containing a placard with the words SAY NO TO JERWOOD, in response to the announcement of a new Jerwood gallery to the region. Laura Oldfield-Ford displays a copy of her Savage Messiah paperzine with its intricate details of architectural deprivation in a highly entertaining comic book graphic mode. Lee Maelzer exhibits ‘Scale’, a painting of both living in beauty and ugliness. Despite the space being much of a white cube outfit architecturally, much of the work has a grungy anarchic populist aesthetic enough to please the fine art connoisseurs and Joe Bloggs coming in off the street. It’s populist pagan poetry and thought-provoking.

Scope 2008

Fresh Air Machine

A Walk In The Woods

Chutney Preserves - Two:

'The Rot Sets In’

Sunday 22nd of June, 2008, on Camberwell Green, Camberwell – 2pm till 7pm

A juxtaposition of workplace with exhibition stage, or perhaps more coherently, experimental lab with ceremonial site, ‘The Rot Sets In’, is decorated like a fete with small gazebos and stalls, and a rotten twist. The fete is in effect, a one day public art work, which visitors to the green can interact with, or just observe if they choose. It will be a humorous and thought provoking display of a broad range of temporary art works and artists that will make reference and take resources from the fine borough of Camberwell.

Sarah Doyle will offer weeds, rescued from between the cracks of the paving stones of Camberwell’s’ streets, from her garden stall, whilst Naomi St Clair Clarke has made an effigy which you can ‘make clean’ with a wet sponge missile. Lady Lucy is a rotten portrait artist, offering to make rotten portraits of visitors to the green from her park bench, possibly beside Rachael House who shall be sharing edible dog poo from a dogs bottom. Ami Clarke will pluck small gifts from her bearded chin, Ben Woodeson will display a number of hand-printed t-shirts of Mayor Johnson, and Miriam Craik-Horan shall respond to Mendelssohn with a lawn mower engine on her face. Jo David proposes to create a cardboard obelisk and miss-information desk with rotten visitor information about Camberwell, Sarah Sparkes will send down messages from her nest in the hanging tree. Andrew Cooper has a composting Wicker Man lying on Camberwell’s lawn and Dean Kenning will ceremonially hoist a totem pole at sundown, made during the day, from collected bottles and cans. Rebecca Feiner will invite passers-by to rant about issues in ‘Ranter’s Corner’. As they do she will make a picture of them and display these, framed on a table. Julian Wakeling has taken a beautiful photograph of pears decomposing. He has made it into postcards and will write messages for visitors to take away. Libby Shearon has transferred images of hobby horses and other spirits from the land onto business men’s white shirts, and Marq P Kearey has a muddy pool with ambitions to facilitate low ebb’s, whilst Geraldine Swayne shall cheer us all with rotten ballads, channelling voices from folk singers who frequented the green in days gone by. Continuing the musical responses, The Lonesome Cowboys From Hell, Calum F Kerr, Tim Flitcroft, Jan Maat and Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly, parade as The Wild ‘Worst’ on Camberwell Green with a rotten western arena, complete with fake camp fire. cApStAn StRiNg a rebel rouser, will embody the spirit of Captain Swing, the long dead peasant agitator. Darren O’Brien has been trying to train worms to make paintings – visitors will be invited to pick a worm to make a muddy painting that they can take away. Be repulsed by Gavin Toye’s revolting paintings and then hit a rotten egg on Ben Newton’s dart board game and take home a jar of green chutney.

Come, come, come along to the great festival of Camberwell Green – ‘The Rot Sets In’.

Poetic License

Harry Pye & His Friends

Poetic License at CRIMES TOWN GALLERY

110 church street N16 OJX June 13th - July 6th

pv Wednesday 11th June

Harry Pye asked me to make a drawing based on a poem that had moved me and I chose

'Twenty Poems Written After Drinking Wine' - number 5by T'ao Ch'ien (365AD–427AD)

I had just moved to London to study on a Foundation course, and was browsing through a display of Chinese poetry books at a shop called Neal Street East in Covent Garden, when I came across this poem by T'ao Ch'ien. Everything seemed to stop around me as I was within the scene and the moment conveyed by this poet writing over a thousand years ago.I couldn't afford to buy the book, so I copied out the words and the poet's name in an address book I was carrying. I learnt it off by heart.Later, with the arrival of the Internet, I searched and found many translations of the poem and interestingly although each time the words were different, the essence of the meaning and the images and feeling conveyed remained the same in each translation. The western alphabet is made up of letters whose formations bear no visual resemblance to the things or ideas that they are describing, but T'ao Ch'ien was writing using Chinese pictoral, representative characters and maybe this is why the meaning is unchanged by the different translations. On the many occasions when I've sat in my rented garden in noisy Camberwell, watching the sunset behind Kings College Hospital incinerator and drinking a gin and tonic, I experience the same moment of profound meaning which cannot be put into words.

Below is a translation of the poem - you can find many more on the internet

translation by David Hinton: Drinking wine - Poem number 5 by T'ao Ch'ien (365AD–427AD)

I live in a town without all that racket

horses and carts stir up,and you wonder

how that could be.Wherever the mind

dwells apart is itself a distant place.

Picking chrysanthemums at my east fence,

far off I see South Mountain: mountain

air lovely at dusk, birds in flight

returning home. All this means something,

something absolute: whenever I start

to explain it, I've forgotten the words.