fala ford exhibition text, Reece Jones

If you’re fortunate enough to be able to maintain a straight line while walking, you’ll be more than able to do the same thing even at a great height, on a precipice, overlooking a fatal drop. There’s no shift to the logic or the demands on your unconscious faculties. Yet most of us will become acutely aware of the mechanics involved in moving ourselves forward. Dizzied by an acrophobic awareness that should the functions we take for granted fail us - we’ll be snuffed out. 

Standing in Nick Paton’s studio for the second time in a year I was overcome by a similar, vertigo inducing sensation. My last visit came at the end of the first Covid lockdown in the UK in 2020, this one after the relaxation of the second. So the pervasive sense that all is not to be taken for granted, that we are fragile and that vital interactions such as this may be stolen away from us is certainly a real one and is in the air. That particular queasiness has been squashed down for months (always nauseatingly there, often terrible but somehow repressed). It’s something we all know well. Today there’s a new prickly awareness. I’ve always been a morbid fantasist (what if I jumped off? what if that pram rolled into the road? what if some masonry fell from a crane?) and in this studio my limbs are physically aching at the possibility of a flailing arm or a casual step causing havoc to a body of work which has been growing for the best part of two years. 

The truth is I’d be mortified to damage any other artists work. That goes without saying. But I rarely feel this attached to the unnerving sentience of the things I encounter. They are far from subservient to my presence as a viewer. Their manifestation was never as simple as the call and response of a designer and their materials. Paton’s process is at face value an amalgamation of skill, material understanding and craft. There are ceramics; pulled out of buckets of sloppy sediment, balanced precariously, fired, glazed or stained. There’s cast iron and steel; cut, welded, ground, tempered.  But despite all this expertise and understanding there is a fundamental sensitivity to the conversation he has with his works. They are never simply made. They are born out of a rolling, turbulent and attritional dialogue. Processes are constantly undermined or bypassed. New methodologies interrupt the standard ones. The object will rebel, sulk or ask to be cosseted and the artist will find a way. Conventions of display will require a hook or an anchor, Paton will birth a new object, bespoke and genealogically of the first, whose role is to hold up its sibling. They will interact with awkwardness - a symbiotic union. 

My nervousness around these things is to do with their autonomy. They are evolved - not executed. It’s there for us to see, there’s beauty - but it’s not only to do with arrangement, harmony or formal merit. It’s in the belchings of an organism which has found a way to exist despite the tyranny of standardised aesthetics. Every bump, fold, knot or crevice is a result of a chaotic logic. This one should be this big because the last one was bigger and collapsed, this one should be an aperture because its solid sister didn’t communicate structure the same way, this one wants to be tied down, this one to be propped up, this one to risk failure, this to be more confident and so it goes. What results is this new language and a methodology which is antithetical to tradition. This writing would clearly fail as a press release because the work is un-paragraphable. It misbehaves and is vulnerable, not only to the physicality of its making but to multiple interpretations. Some of these things look like cages or even portcullises, maybe armour or masks. Some are caves, dwellings, pockets. the readings come thick and fast. But as soon as I acknowledge one association there’s something there to scratch it out or to tip it away from me. Every time one of Paton’s works takes on a tough attitude (for example), the light shifts and the black metallic sheen becomes a pearlescent shell. Every time something holds space and demands to be acknowledged as an object I walk around it a little and it reveals how precarious it can be. So, much like the fatal awareness we get from walking along a rooftop, the more we see of these things, the longer we look, the higher our alertness to their potential and to their willingness to risk it all. Risk is evolutionary in this case. Eating berries to find out whether they are poisonous. The resulting works are uniquely human in their sophistication and their dumbness, their strength and confidence and their ultimate vulnerability.

REECE JONES.   2021

Reece Jones is an artist who lives and works in Suffolk UK. He is an occasional curator and writer and lectures in Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School.

http://reece-jones.com

Time Out - Review

by Chris Waywell

In the spirit of new year, new you, Deptford’s Castor has done some spring cleaning, built a big plywood box and stuck a load of art in it. It’s like a giant plan chest tipped on its side. You pull out the drawers to display the works, a few at a time.

It’s a canny device, swerving the conventional, tired group show, where whoever shouts the loudest controls the room, and where you mentally calculate how much time you need to spend with any artist who isn’t your mate. It also makes you interact with the pieces in unusual, role-playing ways. If you’re the one pulling out the drawers, you’re put into the role of curator, doing the big reveal. If you’re sitting on the bench out front, you’re the critic or the collector. It’s like KidZania. For art.

Like any bunch of stuff you shove in a drawer, some of the pieces fare better than others. So Grace Woodcock’s big earmuff-headphoney things look great against all the industrial-chic ply, while an intense, small, dark painting by Gareth Cadwallader gets a bit lost. But the best panels are really good. Nick Paton’s ceramic plaques with their odd protrusions, Amanda Moström’s spray-painted pants and Rafal Zajko’s cast of a vaguely medical-looking vent all cluster around Sara Anstis’s eccentric painting ‘Beets’ (it does have some beets in it), to everyone’s mutual benefit.

Best of all, though, it’s fun, and a lot of the work is fun too. Because there’s an activity involved in seeing the art, it loses its chilly gallery mystique. It’s just a bunch of stuff, after all. Leaf through it. Maybe there’s something you fancy.

This is Tomorrow - Review

by Sonia Teszler

Approaching Castor Projects along the overground arches in Deptford, the gallery might easily appear closed at first sight. Its shutters, usually open to reveal the current exhibition through a set of large front windows, are rolled down, concealing the inside and already setting the tone for the unique creative experiment ‘Habitual’ presents to its visitors.

‍Entering the gallery through the small front door, the audience is directed towards the exhibition through a segue into a seemingly empty, light grey space with a lonesome bench and a large wooden structure in the corner. At this point there is still no sign of any art in an exhibition of 19 artists. However, instead of a conventional commercial group exhibition, ‘Habitual’ unfolds within the theatrical setting of a compulsive collector’s storage solution. The exhibition text written by David Northedge is a humorous inner monologue of said collector (rich with tongue-in-cheek puns such as “I’d simply buy-curious”). It’s a manic confessional about his or her obsessive tendencies, comparing art collecting to a kind of infectious disease or addiction, while simultaneously serving as a clever and suggestive introduction of the specific works of art in the exhibition.

The allegory of a Brechtian play seems accurate to describe the various layers of ‘Habitual’ insofar as its experimentation with breaking through the art world’s Fourth Wall, as well as changing the pace and choreography of the exhibition. The play commences as a member of the gallery staff invites the viewer to sit on the bench or simply watch on as they step onto the wooden structure (the ‘stage’) and start pulling out its racks one-by-one, revealing the 5 individually curated storage surfaces. Each of these chapters tells a different story, mixing gallery and non-represented artists. Some of my personal highlights include Grace Woodcock’s bodily sculptural piece ‘Pore-Tal’ (2020) evoking futuristic Spacewear in the shape of a soft inner ear. It invites the visitor’s touch both through its intimate materiality and its potential functionality, which is an overarching feature of Woodcock’s practice, balancing between practical design and decorative art. Rafal Zajko’s compact jesmonite sculptures, ‘Otwarcie’ (2020), ‘Vent I’ (2019) and ‘Rebuke’ (2020) are brilliant punchlines with their retro-tech aesthetics, resembling a bird’s-eye view of Soviet buildings or a flattened Gameboy surface. Their blockiness, both robust and somewhat endearing, is a nice contrast to other more ornamental artworks. A few more standouts are the dynamic and rich large oil painting ‘Asymptote’ (2020) by Ben Jamie and two separate smaller canvases, ‘On the Dorpsstraat’ (2020) and ‘On the Eikenlaan’ (2020) by Stevie Dix featuring high-heeled boots, which also speak to the fetishistic element of the exhibition’s metanarrative.

Not only does ‘Habitual’s framework challenge visitor expectations and add another performative dimension to the experience of visiting an art gallery, the intervention also happens on a temporal level. The hang is quasi Salon-style on each board, being antithetical to the display favoured by most commercial exhibitions with works spread out on a neat gallery wall. However, given the imminently theatrical context within which the viewer’s experience emerges, the works are in fact met with a more engaged way of looking that is encouraged by tweaking the tempo. Through each exhibition surface being revealed individually, the exhibition slows down the pace and limits the scope of the viewer’s gaze instead of letting us have it all at once.

In general, group exhibitions can be tricky to truly bring together under a common narrative instead of them being held together by a make-shift concept. The viewer’s attention might linger on some works but can fall into the passive habit of simply scanning over the walls, only engaging with the art in a flat, one-dimensional manner. ’Habitual’ tricks this habit into being more active through its inventive setting. And it takes it all the way – I spoke to Director Andy Wicks about his choice of leaving the entire gallery empty apart from the bench and the central storage structure. He said he in fact considered showing some sculptural work in the space at first, but eventually came to the conclusion that the mise-en-scene and concept would be served better by limiting visual access to the works to only one certain physical and temporal space, keeping them otherwise hidden from view.

These perhaps seemingly compromising, considerate decisions are what in fact make ‘Habitual’ a real experimental triumph. The exhibition manages to reach through the Fourth Wall of the art world in an entertaining and original way that subtly pokes fun at its absurdity, fetishisms and performativity. All the while it still remains graceful, foregrounds the integrity of featured artworks and doesn’t lose this to its elaborate concept.