Month: Jun 2025

goldsmith’s graduate show 2025 (23rd June) – dr suneel mehmi

SEE THE PHOTO SLIDESHOW ON MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL ‘MEHMIS FILMS’ HERE:

https://youtu.be/yk3KPL7Uuqo

1. Nigel Chan – 7/7

    Very kindly and attentively, Nigel led me and my friend around the artworks. He was reading Tolstoy and we discussed Russian literature and the nature of artistic meaning, its ambiguity and its polyphony of interpretations.

    To me, Nigel’s image of a stranded picnic blanket next to a fruit machine in a huge expanse of field spoke of intense loneliness and isolation. The objects are things for humans but there are no humans in the image. The implication is that this is a representation of reality, an objective view at gambling. And the human things themselves are dimunitive, suggesting their insignificance. There is a perceptual shift to focus on these human things, the cloth and the machine. And as we gaze in detail at these things, we could perhaps reflect upon the isolation of the gambler that plays the fruit machine, as they are locked into a lonely game of the self against fate.

    The painting is slanted to imitate the screen of the fruit machine, so in a sense, the viewer is inhabiting the body of the player. We are all gamblers, we all play our games against chance perhaps? The positioning of the unplayed fruit machine and the empty picnic blanket is almost level with the horizon, suggesting a contrast of the red with the blue sky: sin versus goodness. There is a surrealism in the image since it is placed in a field with an unexpected fruit machine there. Is this a removal of human context to suggest a highly personal experience? An equation of isolated gambling with wildness and the antisocial?

    2. Guy Nicholls/Iris Inc. – Wave Yourself a Long Goodbye Because This Moment Breaks Through

    irisinc.co.uk

    @iris_inc

    guymjnicholls@gmail.com

    As I entered the abandoned swimming pool that was now functioning as an art gallery, a surge of music took over. It turned out that Guy Nicholls was performing a song with a rich bassline. I caught him at the end of the performance and he told me that he wanted to test the boundaries of what counted as art and performance with his vocals and the music behind it. The heavy bass was to course through the body and provide a visceral experience to the viewer.

    3. Yoobin Lee – (Harvard women programmers woven cloth and performance)

      Insta: @yoobz_not_found

      yoobzz494@gmail.com

      Arrayed in dazzling white in a white room, I noticed that Yoobin Lee was barefoot. Actually, she was taking a break from her performance and she told us about her piece.

      The cloth featuring the early Harvard women computer programmers was a celebration of female ingenuity, a recovered story of their contribution to the computer revolution. At the same time, there was a celebration of the links between weaving and computing, since computing and its punch cards had evolved from looms.

      Abruptly, she turned away and climbed a dizzying ladder. The performance now began. She plucked at the immense loom she had created like a harp. There was the revealing of the practice of weaving and the reality of the loom, the craft that has manufactured our computer led society. What was the significance of that journey up the ladder to perch on that ledge amongst the ceiling? Perhaps the performance reflected our journey through time and history into the age of the computer through the loom and weaving, the trajectory upwards into technological progress. The elevation of the women as weavers that have created this society as in the cloth of the Harvard programmers? The whiteness of the room and Yoobin Lee’s clothing perhaps an allusion to the environments of computer manufacture.

      4. Hyun Kim – Abstract Love

      hyunjoeykim@gmail.com

      hyunjoeykim.com

      @hyunjoeykim

      What is love? How can it be represented visually? Hyun’s piece explored these interesting questions. Is love obvious? Or is love abstract? The argument made in this piece was that love was abstract. There was a contrast in the representation of abstract love with the padlocks on the gates that attempted to lock love, to render it immortal (it is a lover’s practice to lock souls with these padlocks, apparently). In the abstract side of love, there were remnants of failed relationships which showed that love was not eternal but fleeting.

      The piece reminded me of King Lear. Cordelia’s unspoken love versus the false (and obvious), spoken love of her sisters. Here, the idea was translated into the visual realm: abstract love versus obvious love.

      What was interesting in the artistic binary that was being created was the awareness of the cultural specificity of ideas of love. Hyun mentioned the role of religion in creating ideas of love. In Indian culture, love has to be shown. One cannot be a Cordelia. There must be speaking and there must be demonstration, there must be the obvious.

      5. Ash Jo – Body Botany Chapel Performance

      https://ashjo.io@ashjo.io

      A very beautiful and mesmerising performance unfolded in the chapel as Ash Jo interacted with a simulacrum of her body from which the lillies she had grown had emerged. The idea was the passage of time and the role of memories. There was a ritualistic quality to the motions, with incense and the ringing of the bell which called to mind Buddhist and Hindu practices. There was a great subtletly to the peformance and a subtle dynamism as the two players circled one another and then they were brought towards each other. The climax of the action, when the flowers were cut, was a huge contrast to the original stillness.

      6. Zoe Portela – Crackers Party

      zoerportela@gmail.com

      Insta: @zoefilthyrich

      What attracted me to Zoe’s Gallery was the quality of the singing. She had a very fine voice. There was a sort of mad hatter’s tea party happening, full of life and chaos. It was immersive musical theatre with the visitors gathered at the table too. Very vibrant and enjoyable, a very accessible art form.

      student interviews: central school of st martin’s graduate show

      22.06.2025

      A good jaunt to the graduate show with my friend, I managed to get quite a few artist interviews while I was there. Here’s a few summaries:

      Priyal Jain

      Exceptionally aromatic and very light, Priyal’s sandalwood jewellery is intended to bring a versatile and innovative new material to the field of jewellery design. The jewellery is shaped by native craft techniques and celebrates Indian culture. The jewellery is a wearable, concrete aroma and therefore there is a synaesthetic approach to design, the invocation of the senses of sight, smell and touch. Wood has always been used in religious jewellery in India – Priyal mentioned the ‘rudraksh’ (the tears of Shiva) to me. This was the movement of that beauty of the wood into the secular realm of fashion.

      “Priyal Jain is an Indian jewellery designer who explores the intersection of identity, memory, and material through sculptural, and sensory design. Rooted in storytelling and ancestral craft, her work bridges the personal and the architectural. Her collection, Baari — is carved from sandalwood and stillness.”

      Jiangling Wang

      https://www.wjystudio.com/

      https://ualshowcase.arts.ac.uk/@jianglingwang

      https://www.instagram.com/jiangling._wang/#

      jianglingwang9@gmail.com

      A merging of textile and jewellery design, these interdisciplinary ethereal pieces were almost celestial in their magnificence. Jiangling put one of the pieces on my friend and the jewellery immediately transformed him and transported him to an otherworldly realm. Wonderfully detailed, textural and beautiful, the technique of treating silver as threads of cloth created a gossamer-like miracle of light, both delicate and imposing. The intense work on each piece created an unforgettable and sophisticated visual memory. The translation of weaving techniques into jewellery design represented the nature of innovation: bringing knowledge from one field into another to create a new visuality like Harry Beck’s knowledge of circuit boards into the represention of the map and geographical space.

      “The CANG series draws inspiration from textile craftsmanship, exploring the interaction between tools, techniques, and materials in the formation of jewellery structures. Silver serves as the primary medium, hand-twisted into various wire forms, then woven, assembled, and reconstructed to examine the flow and rhythm between lines.”

      Helena Palmeira

      https://helenapalmeira.com/

      https://www.instagram.com/helenapalmeira/?hl=en

      https://www.instagram.com/estudiohelenapalmeira/?hl=en

      hbbpalmeira@gmail.com

      Helena’s aim was to celebrate the local materials of Brazil and to build exclusive luxury jewellery items with them. The nature of the materials shaped the designs. The vegetable ivory took time to shape. The wood pieces were an intriguing story. The wood was now extinct in Brazil so the only way to source it was to trawl through vintage markets to obtain the material. It took Helena about two months to find some old furniture that was made out of this now extinct wood and to repurpose it. The work had an emphasis on sustainability and also on difficulty: difficulty in sourcing, difficulty in shaping. But difficulty built exclusive, rare, unique pieces of jewellery. It was inaccessibility and hard labour which created the treasure.

      “Helena Palmeira is a Brazilian artist and designer whose practice explores the intersections between body, materiality, and cultural identity.
      A graduate of Central Saint Martins (MA Design), Helena’s work is grounded in deep material research and an ongoing dialogue with historical, social, and personal narratives.
      Through a sculptural and tactile approach, she reimagines objects as mediums of transformation, expression, and connection.
      Sustainability, cultural memory, and the reshaping of form are at the core of her process, often working with responsibly sourced materials such as reclaimed woods, botanical elements, fairmined gemstones, and recycled metals.”

      Julie Yuan

      Insta: @julilie.y

      An innovative screen with four divisions, ‘like everything left in disarray’ played with the two dimensionality of the image and the three dimensionality of the screen and its enclosure of space, with the tension between opacity and invisibility. The screen represented the projection of the dream onto human memories and photography, the merging of fantastical elements with the recording of reality. My friend was particularly impressed with the painterly brushstrokes and the subtle, mother of pearl aesthetic of the piece.

      Dalia Halwani

      Insta: @dxlixhxl

      Dalia’s video installation was surrounded by her photography. She criticised the Orientalist tropes of sci-fi films such as contemporary avatars of the Odalisque which worked with dog-whistle racism to denigrate Arabs and Arabic culture in the capitalistic framework of the Western film industry. And which subverted that culture through the sexualisation of its misappropriated characters. The piece was mounted on a carpet which invoked the stereotypical imagery associated with the Arabs such as the fantastical flying carpet from feature films such as Disney’s Alladin.

      Dickens House 100th Anniversary

      09.06.2025

      Last night, my friend invited me to come down to the Dickens House as it was free entry. I had been before a few times a few years ago when I used to volunteer at the Foundling Hospital Museum down the road. Charles Dickens is one of my favourite authors as I admire his maximalist style, his sentimentality and also the fact that he came from an impoverished background and was a champion of the oppressed (except for the colonised and the Indians). As I am a published expert on Charles Dickens (‘The Preservation of the Power Name ‘Boz’ and the Foundling’ in The Dickens Quarterly), I decided to go down and give him a tour around the place. It was almost like being invited into the author’s home by the author himself. A visit to the ghost.

      On arrival, I was given solicitous care by the staff because they saw I was carrying a walking stick. And almost at once, I met a volunteer I work with because I am also in the museums industry. As ever, he showcased his great customer service skills.

      We started off in the kitchen downstairs and I was very pleased to see how inviting and friendly the volunteers were. We spoke to two of them, one an intern who was a student in Museum studies. The volunteer in the kitchen was very knowledgeable and we talked about Dickens’s love of food and wine which stemmed from his starvation as a child. We speculated on whether he would have spent any time in the kitchen. There was a likelihood as he was quite fastidious in matters as a whole and food was one of his especial subjects. In the corner of the room there was an interesting curator label – after Dickens, one of the residents in the house had been a sufragette who had slashed the Velazquez Venus in the National Gallery.

      In the laundry room, I commented to another visitor, a blonde American lady, that this was the height of sophistication and luxury in that period. They even boiled the Christmas pudding there once a year!

      On the ground floor, in the dining room, we admired the Moses Pickwick clock that had been gifted to Charles Dickens. I had written about Charles Dickens’s assumption of the name Moses in my article, so I knew quite a lot about this gentleman who had been a foundling. We speculated on who had carved the letters C.D. onto one of the utensils in the room.

      The second room on the ground floor was the morning room. We spent quite a while gazing at the portrait of Catherine, Dickens’s wife. This captivating piece was painted by Daniel Maclise. The setting is the morning room itself. In response to what one of the visitors said, and sadly to disillusion her, I mentioned that Dickens eventually separated from her and even tried to get her admitted to a lunatic asylum. There was the President of one of the Dickens Committee there and I told her about my article about Dickens.

      Upstairs, there was Dickens’s study and the drawing room. I was excited to see the desk where all the magic happened. It was always the highlight of my trip there in the past. A volunteer called Michael answered my friend’s questions and told us about the lighting at the time for writing. Then he answered my questions about who owned the house at the moment and showed me to the drawing room because I said to him that I had heard that the descendant of Dickens was there too.

      The drawing room was magnificent. It must have been such a wonderful experience to meet the author there. The descendant was a handsome, brown-haired, articulate and charismatic young gentleman called Ollie. I watched an eager crowd filming him as they asked him questions. I waited until they had gone and asked him if he wrote himself. Not so much he said, although he was an actor. I said that then he was following in Dickens’s footsteps and we talked about the author’s dramatic experiences.

      In the exhibitions space, we admired the only surviving costume that we knew Dickens had worn and talked about his heroism when there was a train wreck. It was also a great highlight to see the Gold beater’s arm (‘the Golden Arm’) of a Tale of Two Cities. While for Dickens, it stood for the brutality of the Revolution, for me the anarchist, it stood as a symbol of hope for the transformation of the present and the future.

      On the second floor, it was interesting to learn that Dickens had surrounded himself with mirrors so that he could practice his acting. I imagined him there, gesticulating in front of his mirrors, refining the expressions on his face, communicating something to his imaginary audience.

      In the dressing room, we looked out of the window that Dickens might have looked out of. An emotional moment was in Mary Hogarth’s bedroom. I imagined her dying in Dickens’s arms and I said to my friend that I found the sentimentality in the work of Dickens very affecting. I had found the death of Little Nell (modelled on Mary Hogarth, his young sister-in-law) to be quite affecting. It is the emotion that Dickens arouses that is the draw to his work in a modern Western literature of restraint, of stunted emotion and stunted prose.

      The whole room was dedicated to death and the vacuum it brings with it. The death of Mary Hogarth and Little Nell was likened to the death of Dickens himself in an exhibit, ’The Empty Chair’, Gad’s Hill–Ninth of June 1870, a print of an engraving by Samuel Luke Fildes. Apparently, this haunting image of the author’s absence influenced Van Gogh who also famously painted an empty chair too, to play with the idea of absence and presence. I am an admirer of both Dickens and Gogh, so this creative correspondence was highly engaging.

      After I had looked at the empty chair, I myself fell into the empty chair in the room. I have had that leg operation and I needed a rest for the niggling pain in my shin but I was very pleased that it wasn’t that bad over the past few days and I am improving on the strength in the leg. The volunteer very kindly cleared it and gave it to me. An elderly lady passing by me looked at me conspiratorially and fanned herself, evidently in the throes of a hot flush.

      My friend and I read a children’s book together in the book corner to do with a Jewish woman called Eliza who had written to complain to Dickens about his representation of the Jewish Fagin. The children’s book was intended to show it as an example of social transformation and atonement for wrong to a people. I did wonder to myself what Dickens would have made of me writing to him as an Indian to address the wrongs that he had done to our people in his writing (“The Perils of Certain English Prisoners” for instance showed his lack of sympathy for the Indian Mutiny). What was interesting about the book is that we think these kind of debates about identity are a mark of ‘woke culture’, when we have been having these debates for centuries. And still racism persists. Because people will not wake up from oppression, prejudice and injustice.

      In the upper floor, we talked about the influence of the raven in Barnaby Rudge upon Edgar Allen Poe. And whether ravens could actually talk!

      On the way out, Ollie and the other staff gave us a warm farewell. It was a nice ending to a beautiful visit. I remarked to my friend that I was inspired again to read the novels of this master. Looking around at the lived reality and material objects and scenes that had given form to the works had really enriched my understanding of the memories of reading and being in the mind of Dickens. The experience was invigorating, incredible, intimate.