“Philosophy for toddlers” is the best description I heard of Floss Cobb’s giant domino set, currently on display at the Sueli Turner Gallery. The wooden dominoes, each about the size of a laptop, are carved with images of people who have inspired Cobb, an eclectic bunch ranging from Samuel Pepys to the dancer and choreographer Michael Clark.
Gallery visitors are encouraged to play with the dominoes, making their own connections between writers and politicans, artists and scientists. Personally I fancied bringing together Elizabeth I and Rosa Luxemburg, the red revolutionary who often carried a parasol and founded the Spartacist movement in Berlin.
Cobb’s dominoes are part of the Mythical Lyrical exhibition, which brings together artworks “driven by myth…ancient, cultural or urban”. This is a pretty wide remit, especially if you count religion as myth. Interestingly, with the exception of Faisal Abdu’Allah’s Harlesden street talk take on the Last Supper, the featured artists have avoided/evaded established religion. The closest the exhibition comes to any overt thread linking pieces is a hint of paganism/shamanism.
Half-human, half-animal figures appear in several of the artworks. For me the most accomplished interpretation of this classical theme is Hedley Roberts‘ A Country Alliance (see above). Using digital printing and oil painting Roberts recreates a version of the ancestral portraits used to decorate stately homes and provide a visual record of a family’s history.
Apart from the obvious link between hunter and hunted Roberts’ lord and lady of the manor play around with settings that we think we know well. The reproduction of William Morris’s ‘Willow Bough’ and ‘Fruit’ designs as a backdrop seems to transport the aristocrats from a story written by one of the Mitford sisters to Hampstead Garden Suburb.
Adding to the sense of displacment the woman, with her red lips and curled hair, looks more like an escapee from a Hollywood film poster than a descendant of the Duke of Whatnotshire. Roberts says he “sourced” her “through Merle Oberon playing George Sand in the 1945 film A Song to Remember”.
Standing before Roberts creation made me feel as though I were in a National Trust shop where the stock had been re-organised by Will Self – confused but more interested than I thought I would be.
If you go to see Mythical Lyrical don’t neglect to look behind the wall made of loaves of bread, an installation by gallery owner Sueli Turner. Tucked away in this little annexe are three “commemorative plates” made by Eric Great-Rex. One is decorated with tree silhouettes, their tall trunks and long branches reminiscent of the plane trees that grace so many London parks. There is a figure hanging from one of the trees’ branches, really no more than a semi-transparent, person-shaped membrane, like a memory of the murdered and suicidal.
The hanging figure reminded me of The Tree That Remembers, a film inspired by the suicide of a young Iranian political activist who was exiled in Canada. It also convinced me that Great-Rex is commemorating a city park, rather than a country scene. After all cities tend to be where people bring dreams and nightmares that don’t always work out as planned.
Mythical Lyrical runs until 23 December 2009.
