Review by Dr. Suneel Mehmi. Images courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery with permission granted to reuse. This is an unpublished first draft for the Plant Curator website – https://plantcurator.com/
An inspiration for the ages and a fount of creativity, flowers have been the originating force, subject and detail of the masterpieces of all cultures. A colossus of endeavour and love, the flower exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery celebrates the contribution – and the omnipresence – of these unparalleled objects of beauty up to and including the present moment. The achievement? To have made a discriminating incision into the ubiquity of the flower in art so that the satisfactory slice can be served up – and digested.
Ranging across two floors which house large-scale installations, technically innovative videography, paintings, graphic design, textiles and photography, over 500 unique artworks and objects form the display. Organisation across this wealth of material is found in nine sections which deal with topics such as fashion, books and film, and representations of the flowers in the work of emerging contemporary artists.
In one room, we find the bespoke installation piece by Rebecca Louise Law, made up of over 100,000 dried flowers that have been salvaged from the wasteful society. A creation of sublimity from rejection which can be viewed from the floor or from above in the balcony. Another space has been transformed into an innovative and interactive digital projection by French artist Miguel Chevalier where we move the flowers and, in turn, they move us. A virtual garden of the imagination.
There is a mixture of justifiably perennial sources of delight such as Boticelli’s Primavera and the designs of William Morris alongside the unknown and uncontemplated work of others around the globe. Highlights include the 3D bronze sculpture of Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ by Rob and Nick Carter, where the viewing experience of the artwork is renewed (and given another dimension, if the pun is forgiven), Anna Von Freyburg’s gloriously coloured textile interpretation of a Dutch still life painting, Vivienne Westwood’s sensational floral costumes and Ann Carrington’s collection of finds in silver and cutlery for her shining and awe inpiring sculptures of remodification and metamorphosis.
What the exhibition succeeds in doing well is to sting the monkey of the mind so that she flickers across the branches of the canopy, forever at all moments looking for new paths of exploration and into new thoughts. There is so much beauty, so much food for thought.
What struck me in particular was the constant oscillation and the influence of the flower on the female body and the female body on the flowers. And how this dynamic has been woven into art and culture. Women have been understood as flowers, however we may interpret that equation. The exhibition suggests that works such as Mucha’s ‘La Rose’ give the woman flower the aura of power, the transcendence of a domestic role. In Gary Hume’s ‘Two Blooms, Grey Fields’, we are advised to see human faces in the flowers, a coupling of minds.
Another theme that emerged was the relationship between violence and the flowers. Sometimes, ‘flower power’ was an antidote to the oppressive state and the military as we see in photographs, such as Bernie Boston’s image of George Harris sticking carnations into gun barrels during the demonstrations against the Vietnamese war in 1967. In Wole Lagunju’s reinterpretation of the violence of ‘Judith with the Head of Holofernes’, we see flowers from the cultural iconography of the Yoruba which invigorates a postcolonial approach to real history.
As with all subjects of art, it was interesting to see the pull between the abstract representations of flowers, such as Damien Hirst’s ‘Valium’ and the figurative brilliances of art such as Janet Pulcho’s ‘The Dream of Love’ which was painted last year.
To end the exhibition on emerging voices was infinitely pleasing. A demonstration that the fascination with the flower and its beauty drives contemporary art and will be the future for art for time to come.
Immensely enjoyable and productive for a creative mind, ‘Flowers’ at the Saatchi Gallery is a big and delicious fish to have caught and to feast upon. I spent three hours in each of the spaces hoovering everything up. Beautiful variety, stylish presentation of the pieces, the experience was like an entry in the kaleidoscope of the senses. I learnt much, I contemplated much, I hungered much for the beauty of some of the pieces. My overall impression was of a shining, irresistibly coloured flower which emerges from the dark to cast its wonder upon a world of hearts.
Synonymous with the figure of the great and suffering artist, for many, Vincent Van Gogh represents the quintessential meaning of modern art. ‘Poets and Lovers’ brings together his best loved paintings alongside ones that are rarely seen in public. His drawings are interspersed throughout.
Over just two years in the south of France at the end of the nineteenth century, Van Gogh’s fertile and versatile imagination created a revolution in style which married the wonder of the Japanese vision with all the spirituality and poetry of the West. The exhibition encompasses this transformative and influential, inspirational journey in Arles and Saint-Rémy as masterpieces such as ‘Sunflowers’ were painted and the artist explores – with all of his fevered intensity – the realms of poetry and love.
Van Gogh struggled with mental health issues during this time – the current psychological and spiritual crisis that is marring humanity in this moment and therefore of the utmost relevance and significance to us. The exhibition shows how he transcended suffering. And that it was because of this suffering that he became Van Gogh. The exhibition is a demonstration of the strength of the human and of our resilience, creativity and adaptation in the face of collapse and breakdown.
Portraits abound as do scenes of the garden, including the most revealing imaginative grounds of the asylum where Van Gogh was treated. Each picture shows how Van Gogh coupled poetry and romance with an inner vision of things external to create beauty and the vivid life we see in each of his swirls and pirouettes across the canvas to envisage anew nature and individuals.
Highlights of the exhibition include ‘Starry Night over the Rhône’ (1888, Musée d’Orsay), ‘The Yellow House’ (1888, Van Gogh Museum), as well as the National Gallery’s ‘Sunflowers’ (1888) and ‘Van Gogh’s Chair’ (1889).
This is the first major exhibition devoted to Van Gogh in the National Gallery’s rich history.
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Well researched and genuinely generous to the artist’s ouevre, the Van Gogh exhibition really is a delight for those that love his work and want to know more about his life and inspirations. What was particularly interesting for me was the devotion to the literary and artistic influences on the man as some of the most famous episodes of his existence unfolded: the friendship and arguments with Paul Gaugin and, notoriously, the episodes of mental illness. Van Gogh emerges as the devotee of romance novels, a dreamer and a romantic.
The selection of paintings work as an artistic map of Van Gogh’s journey and exploration of a new locale. He investigates the landscape creatively and with inspired fervour. He remakes the world into his own shape. We see how from a first infatuation, darker and darker elements of the landscape and the world crystallise in the works, the descent into mental difficulties.
As we walk around the many rooms of the exhibition, we mirror Van Gogh’s tracing of the territories around him that he claimed: and we claim that artistic map of the world ourselves, these two years of life amidst the countryside, the Yellow House and the asylum.
Love is a major theme of the exhibition, Van Gogh’s dream of love. The desire to belong to someone. The early landscapes are idealised worlds of love populated by couples, romance and poetry. Van Gogh repeatedly associated poetry with love. This love counterbalances with the cold institutionalisation of the asylum where, perhaps, love is impossible.
On the walls of the exhibition, we see morsels of Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo which explain and promote his work. The words allow us to see what his intentions were behind each of the works, the deep river of emotion behind every brush stroke, what was attempted as expression and idealisation. The powerful voice of the man and his humanity and feeling.
Profound, moving, inspirational. This is how I would describe the Van Gogh exhibition. A delight for the lovers of Van Gogh and also, a meditation on how place transforms personality and creativity and how personality and creativity transform place. The magical canvases and portals into the imagination and poetry of Van Gogh and humanity itself are on show here. Who could object or criticise this wonderful achievement?
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Suneel’s Notes
When I looked at the portrait of ‘The Lover (Portrait of Lieutenant Milliet)’, I was struck by the sadness of Van Gogh. The artist, all alone, dreaming of love, had looked upon Milliet with envy because of his success with women. Here was the artist, the dreamer, the creator of beauty, looking at what the women love: a man of the state. The man synonymous with the power of the state and its violence. A man of violence. I too looked at this figure in this uniform that was the object of female desire with sadness and resignation, remembering my own failures in love. And I shared the subversive vision of Van Gogh who had reversed the star and crescent which was the regimental emblem of Milliet’s infantry unit the Zouaves. A desire to change the desires of others. A desire to transform and subvert the symbols of the state. A criticism of love and its conservativism. A desire for revolution and change. A desire to reverse reality.
What after all is envy? The imaginative desire to transcend and to transform reality so that it is the self that is favoured instead of the other. You contemplate the fortune of the other and the love that the other receives through their privilege and their adherence to the status quo and you feel that you deserve the same no matter how different you are. Envy is not inferiority. Envy is the feeling of life and others not having been fair to you. If life is unfair, at least in the imagination you can be fair to yourself. Because you deserve love too. And if the only way to get love is to shake the foundations of the world, this can be done in art.
Against the man of violence, we protest love. Against the staring face of the state and its coercion and violence, we protest love. Against power, the powerless protest love. Sadly. Against the blue background of depression and the blue scars and bruises of the heart.
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The garden abounded in Van Gogh’s art. The beautiful garden. The dream to have a garden, to be in the garden, to tend the garden, to live a life in the garden away from the troubles of the world.
But the flowers? The flowers were little dots and dashes. What was of the magnificence and study was the sturdy tree. The trees dominated, swirled and danced in the flow of the artist’s brush and pen. Invigorating, powerful, the connection with nature, with healing. For many of the gardens were in the midst of mental suffering, in the asylum. Those trees were anchors which held the artist down to the world. Their patterns and their growth an inspiration to go on, to keep on finding beauty, to grow again.
And then, the sunflowers and the oleanders and irises. What Van Gogh could not give attention to in the garden, he gave attention to within the home. Away from the overpowering force of the garden and the outside world. Once more, he could concentrate. The meaning of the flowers became clear to me. The attention to beauty, to life. It could come back again from the assault of the senses that was the outside world.
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Van Gogh. An artist. A poet. A writter of letters.
But above all, a reader. A dweller of the imagination and of the city of beauty.
Many paintings and drawings inspired by novels. And the one that struck me the most in what he read and how he presented his reading was Zola’s The Sin of Abbe Mouret (La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret), about a priest that forgets about his vows of chastity.
For Van Gogh is a man consumed with the passion of love and the passion to love. And love is what he is not getting in his life or from his art.
And that one novel, of falling in love, of feeling the madness of love, of forgetting the self, destroying the self, falling completely, completely… This is the dream of love. The dream of the artist. The dream of the lover of beauty.
And when you have understood what that novel is and the role of nature and the flowers within it, including in the tragic ending, that is when you understand Van Gogh and his art as a whole.
I have loved Van Gogh’s art my whole life. The dancing, mesmerising swirls. The vivid colours, brighter and more intense than this drab life that we have to live. A man that dreams of absolute love, whose art is a plea for that absolute love. The absolute love which I give to Van Gogh. However different he is from me. However we may disagree on things. He is the poet and the lover. And in that, he is me.
A portrait might be about many things. But it is often about a moment of human connection with someone and a relationship. The artist’s relationship with the sitter, or even himself or herself in a self-portrait. I was inspired by the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery where I used to volunteer just before the Covid Pandemic. I wanted to be – and still want to be – a portrait painter and and a portrait photographer. The human face, the human form, personality, psychology – all these are endlessly fascinating to me. Life gives us opportunities. Even if the people you care about the most won’t let you take them, sometimes you get lucky. Just yesterday, I took three portraits of one of my closest friends with my camera who has always resisted my entreaties. He was very pleased with the results as he thought himself very fine in them. I told him the truth: I see him as very good looking. So in my camera, he is good looking. I am comfortable with my sexuality: only women are attractive to me. So I don’t mind telling men that they are handsome if I think so. It is not often.
Here are a few notes about the work that some of my peers are doing because they actually have the time to do these things. I look at their work with a trace of jealousy because they have time, something that I don’t have, and willing sitters, people close to them. Again, something I do not have in my life.
Download the large-print exhibition guide here to see more detailed notes about each of the paintings that I discuss:
The Last Portrait By Aleksandra Sokolova Oil on canvas, 2020
An old man. A veteran from the world wars. An artist. With a mug and a piece of bread. A commonplace scene of life elevated to art. The layers in the background build up in the humble kitchen scene in a series of three, giving a strong horizontal, structured feel to the painting. The man’s head is caught in the second and topmost of the three layers. Wisps of smoke emerge behind the head of this figure, who is imposing and strong, giving him perhaps an appearance of what? Heat, spirituality (he died while this was being painted – is it a spirit photograph that is capturing his soul departing)? A contrast to his strength with his paunch? What does he signify? Consumption, as he is eating? A moment of repose? But there is movement coming or which has just finished. The glass is just on the edge of the table – either he has just put it back or is just about to pick it up. Time is ambiguously presented: a snapshot in either the immediate before or the immediate future.
Anna By Jack Freeman Oil on canvas, 2023
Her black eyes. But more than that, her black hair which dominates the image for me. The hair of the one that you love. Wild and untamed on the pillow in the bed and seen from above. Twisting about in its full richness like a dark forest above her head. Like a mermaid in the water. The hair of the goddess. In Hindu mythology, when Draupadi was dishonoured, she vowed to keep her hair untamed until she bathed it in the blood of her oppressor. One of her husbands vowed to drink the oppressor’s blood, a terrible oath. The hair of revenge. Shiva, the god of destruction and creation, the Lord of the Dance, his hair was also unkempt and powerful and contained the waters, the Ganges that descended from heaven. Why the water? Why think of it? She is holding a cup. She seems suspended in water, with that crowning glory of hair and its strength. The hair of the woman that you love.
Stereo (diptych) By Peter Davis Acrylic on canvas, 2023
A study in how colour creates unconscious meaning and prejudice. Two studies of a Muslim woman side to side, one in black clothes and another in white, with hijabs in both. The background is the opposite colour to the clothes in both cases. In black clothes, she appears more scarred. In white clothes, she does appear different. But what is the difference when you look at the images side by side? The difference is that when you associate ethnic minorities with black, black as it contrasts with the whiteness that is our surrounding and our culture, then in this culture, we appear scarred. The eyes appear to have no life or soul in them in the black costume, whereas they appear to have more life in the white costume. In the white costume, the face seems friendlier. There is an exposure of how taking on whiteness for an ethnic minority is what makes them palatable in this society. And the lesson? The lesson in the choice. Because I have chosen to take the blackness. If not in clothes, in my behaviour. And, in one context that I am in, many people call me by the name of one of the black men that work there. Because they recognise the blackness in me, even though I am Asian.
Double Portrait of Clara By Michael Slusakowicz Oil on canvas, 2021
A woman decides between two university courses. She becomes two people, one whose shoulder supports the other’s head. But what is the message here? An idea of self support? Or isn’t this about a woman’s decision making process, when she becomes two people because the decision will be life altering. She can either take the decision in which she is the support or the supported. Isn’t this about a woman’s career choice and whether she wants to make enough money to be ‘independent’ or whether she will need someone to look after her? Since in this society, education just means money to most people?
The supported woman wears blue and seems depressed, tired, languid. Because this is how this society sees the dependent. But look again at the woman that is supporting. She looks away from who she supports coldly, a glaring contrast to the warm colours of yellow and red that she is wearing. And she is blue in the face too. Ultimately, whatever the decision that is going to be made, both of the women are blue and seem depressed. At the moment of greatest excitement in life, when you are forging the future, the women are blue. Because one decision perhaps, will be to have wealth but not happiness in what you do. And the other decision will be to have the work but not the reward. The bind that informs all our choices for education in this kind of society.
The floral shirt integrates the man into the palm house at Kew Gardens. The requirement of the moment is to be integrated into nature. However, he holds a flower that droops downwards – the flowers are dying. They need their protector, they need help like the blooming flowers in the palm house that they are contrasted to. He is old, with white hair. The protection is in the hands of the older generation. The children do not have the resources. But behind, there are all youngsters walking around the Gardens: one day they will be in a position to protect because they will have the resources. It is just a matter of time.
Gerard in Hospice By Jackie Anderson Oil on cotton, 2023
A memorial to a dying husband by a loving wife. Minimalistic. Done in a wash of brown, delicate and virtuoso like a Da Vinci drawing. Simple, elegant. Hugely impactful. In the style of the succinct, in the style of brevity. The silence of real grief behind it, the restrained emotion, the guarded feelings that would burst out and consume everything if they could.
Jacqueline with Still Life By Antony Williams Tempera on board, 2020
A portrait of desire, a nude of a beautiful woman. The one painting that seemed to be most about desire. And desire with a mystery. The face, the artist says, is mysterious. And the symbolism is mysterious. The figure is between a fan and a heater – extremes of temperature compete with each other on either side. What does this say about the body in the middle which the fan is to cool or the heater to heat? And don’t we know that heat and cold are how we think about desire and lust? Is this a comment about art and the nude? That we have to reach a medium between lust and cool observation when we are representing our desire?
The still life that is compared and contrasted to the naked body below. A model of a dinosaur, a model of two houses. A dinosaur living in modern times? Sublime nature which towers above human built design and homes? Is the idea of nature contrasting and comparing with the woman ‘in a state of nature’ in the nude? There is a cross at the base of the wooden table – introducing the iconography of the wooden cross to complicate things. A resonance of Christ’s nakedness on the cross? Woman as victim and martyr?
The Most Important Thing in the World By Stephen Leho Oil on canvas, 2020
A woman unpacking a home-made mobile after a mental strain. The face lost in the task. The strangeness of the moment as she destroys what is built, undoes what is done. Perhaps a comment upon the craziness of attention in this society – the trivial things that we bestow our attention on, their ultimate meaninglessness. But also an image of hope: because, hopefully, she will become better. And bestow her attention onto something that she should be bestowing it upon. Something productive and not destructive.
I’ll Never Not Miss You By Laura Carey Oil on canvas, 2023
The emotions as folds and cloth which covers the body of the person we bestow the emotions onto, making them impossible to see as they are – the human condition.
Quoted from the exhibition catalogue.
Laura Carey painted her mother enveloped in a bright red blanket during an afternoon sleep brought on by her chemotherapy treatment. She explains: ‘Her blanket is my love, my anger, hopelessness, grief as well as her cancer all at once.’
Self-Portrait at Low Tide By Alex Tzavaras Oil on linen, 2023
A modern version of Munch’s ‘The Scream’ it appeared to me, with the man in the hoodie that sees hope in the beautiful sky reflected in the sand after a mental illness. We can see the sky behind him in its original state. Not what he sees. This is the thing that got me in the painting – you can’t see the hope in it. You can’t see his hope. What instigates his hope is there up in the sky. But the medium between the sky and us and him, that is not there. Why not? What is this saying about hope and how we can see it? Is it saying that you need a magical moment and unity with nature and existence to have hope? A moment that can’t be shared with others? Is it a comment upon the individualistic nature of hope? That it can only be created in an individual and not in a society, that it can’t be shared? That it is a moment of individual, private psychology?
Or am I reading this completely wrong? Is the idea that hope is always there behind us, following us around. That we just need to see it somewhere? Where is not important?
Maybe the idea is that hope is not really there. There is just its illusion. It is built upon sand, to quote the bible. Sand is not steady. Perhaps the mental illness and the darkness is still there:
life cries
her eyes fill with tears
that never fall
and they hide
for us to slip on
Before it’s Ruined (or an Unrealized Mean Side) By Rebecca Orcutt Oil on canvas, 2020
A woman. An oversized coat. A web. Perhaps an idea of weaving since the textiles are so conspicuous and perhaps an allusion to the Greek myth about the spider’s web and weaving as a competition between Arachne and Athena. If so, about woman’s transformation into nature and the fragility of nature, since the web goes across her forehead and seems to be united with her body as well as her clothes which it is also overlapping against (reinforcing the idea of weaving and the web, the idea of textiles). It could be the wish to be integrated into nature as woman becomes spider but also the desire not to be, as the title suggests that the web is to be torn by the model in the painting, that the work of weaving is to be undone (as traditional roles for femininity as woman weaving are resisted?) An ambiguous and mysterious piece of work.
Summary: Artwork from the African Diaspora. The website says:
”As well as surveying the presence of the Black figure in Western art history, we examine its absence – and the story of representation told through these works, as well as the social, psychological and cultural contexts in which they were produced”.
Notes:
– The title ‘The Time is Always Now’ comes from James Baldwin in the 1960s writing about the civil rights struggle.
My comment: So the aim of the exhibition is to combat racism and this is what it should be judged on – if it is giving dignity, equality and positivity to the black figure. Is it?
Overall impressions:
Goes through quite a lot of the current thinking about racism like ‘double consciousness’ when non-white people have to look at themselves through a white perspective as well as their own non-white perspective, etc. Educational for people that haven’t experienced racism and don’t really understand what it is like.
The art is presented as educational and as being completely resistant to racism. Can art be unambiguous and not contradictory like that? How easy is it to escape racism and to be free in terms of artistic vision and in your expression?
And how beautiful are the artworks? Were they captivating? Art does not have to be apolitical to be beautiful. But I wonder whether there were any pieces of great beauty in this exhibition.
The artist says this is a composited fictional character ‘which really looks at the value systems contained within portraiture and monuments’. He was supposed to be giving power and grandeur to ‘fictional everyday people’, the under-represented black people excluded from art history and classical sculpture.
My Comment: Why closed eyes? The artist says she is embracing ‘the inner world that she’s manifesting there and trying to bring clarity perhaps, to all this noise around us’.
I wrote a book about the valuation of symbolic blindness in imperialistic, racist and misogynistic Victorian Britain. When blindness stood for power. Are the eyes closed because of this association from the past? Devaluation of sight in this system of valuation as in Western culture – when for Indians it is the queen of the senses and the motor of revolution.
The statue stands right at the front of an exhibition where we are looking – a guide to how we are supposed to see the rest of the exhibition?
Composited photographs from Victorian Britain by Galton were used to isolate supposed ‘racial features’ – how distanced is this sculpture from that process of racism and essentialisation when we are talking about race and the black figure reframed?
My favourite painting in the whole exhibition. This is an intimate portrait of one of the artist’s friends and family. It is about a ‘human relationship’, not a person.
The face is caught in a mood of introspection. A thinking man. A reflection on thought and on the minds that give us our personality, that create our relationships with others. The restricted palette of pink is beautiful: textured, cloudlike, dreamy. Details make up the piece, there are no flat colours, many many colours. Complication. Nuance in technique. The enigmatic meaning of the feet – one clothed foot, one bare. The play between the spectacle of the body and the covering of the clothes, the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’. A drip of paint falls from the black figure as it escapes into liquid from form. There is an air of insubstantiality, dissolution, as though everything is melting away.
The thoughts of this thinking man are what are highlighted by the artist in the personal relationship. So is she connected to him because he thinks? And what is the emotion here about that connection and his thinking? It is a mysterious image, a puzzle. Maybe her thoughts about him are unresolved, oscillating between definite form and the cloudiness that informs the image. An ambigious, contradictory and paradoxical image.
This is supposed to ‘dismantle’ an exclusionary Western visual representation and to subvert it. The artist is replacing the white female figures from neoclassical style paintings with black women. The artist deconstructs the western representation and removes it from the picture through cutting, etc. Then, he inserts the black figure – inclusion.
In this painting, the black serving figure for the white woman then serves the black woman instead, so the racial power disappears from the image.
The white figure disappears and becomes a black face. However, there is a sophisticated point to this image: the white figure is still providing the frame for the black face. Blackness is still being seen through the frame of whiteness. If you look carefully, one of the eyes is cut off by the outlines of the white figure that has been cut out. The black eye is limited by the white outlines that have been given to us from history. There is a tired self-awareness in this image.
The black face inside the white frame looks sad. Her own body is missing – the black body. Even her hair – with all of its power and symbolism – is not being presented. We are seeing the fragment of a black woman’s body – she still hasn’t achieved full representation. The image conveys the sadness of racism and the artist’s rendition of the black figure. It is still a work in progress, still unattained. The Time is Always Now…
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Biography
He says that he has Greek and Welsh blood and that he wanted to be a pilot when he was a child, his favourite TV show is Scooby Doo and that his favourite author was Roald Dahl (who was an inventor himself – he invented a medical device and things like his own desk – Charlie and the Chocolate factory is about invention – Suneel). The artist’s favourite film is ‘The Dark Knight’. His favourite sandwich filling is Cheese and pickle.
Born in 1978, raised in North London, Paul Cocksedge lives and works in Hackney, East London.
His works encompass public art, sculpture and architectural installation. The artist has an interest in science, with ‘a forensic investigation into the limitations of processes, materials, and the human body’ and attention given to ‘our relationship to the Earth
The artist believes that he ‘came to art on his own terms’ which brings a ‘freshness in perspective’.
What interests me as a designer is to be open to ideas coming from any direction. I’m also always sort of interested in like, the invisible things such as electricity, and gravity and magnetism, these types of energies.
The artist was once evicted from his Hackney studio which he occupied for 12 years (which was once a Victorian stable) to make way for a new property development. He created a work called ‘Eviction’ by excavating material from the floor to make furniture:
Cocksedge hopes the work will cause people to reflect on the uncertainty affecting creative centres around the world, caused by rising property prices and socio-political upheavals.
For Paul Cocksedge, each body of work is a vehicle for narrative, drawing inspiration from and abstracting the physical process of making. Cocksedge’s practice can be defined by a search for hidden values and properties in order to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Selected Notable Works Besides ‘Coalescence’ with Suneel’s Analysis (see links for photographs)
If you look at his works, they are each remarkable. The artist has frozen metal furniture together to join it. He has’ completed a spiral staircase featuring a garden, a library and a tea bar’ https://www.dezeen.com/tag/paul-cocksedge . He has created a table solely from a single sheet of folded metal paper. These are a few of the artworks which I found interesting and related to the themes of ‘Coalescence’
‘Please be Seated’
A rippling wave rises up to form arches for people to pass beneath, and curves under to create spaces to sit, lie and relax in Please Be Seated.
“This piece was an instinctive response to the space and the rhythm of people through it. It fills a public square and engages passersby, without obstructing the space.” – Paul Cocksedge
Suneel’s Comment – Innovation in seating and the space that it encloses, so that the area can be used for multiple purposes of leisure interaction. The design is effective because it uses shade as a resource – you can sit or lie underneath the seating. This shows the artist’s attention to changing conditions, the influence of outside influences on space and art, the play with previous structures and forms to build new dimensions in the art. The rippling wave looks like an opening flower from above – it is beautiful to behold.
‘Bourrasque Dior’
Inspired by nature and the morphology of paper, Bourrasque – which means “flurry”, or “gust” – is a free-flowing sculpture that harnesses the magic of light and electricity.
The piece conceived to mimic pages scattered by a gust of wind is illuminated and bathes the surrounding environment with light.
“Bourrasque is the representation of the power of new technology, creating a magical fleeting moment. This is an effortless yet detailed gesture, capturing electricity floating in the air. The iconic Dior boutique was the perfect environment to install Bourrasque as a permanent piece.” – Paul Cocksedge.
Suneel’s Comment: As with seating in ‘Please be Seated’ and the coal in ‘Coalescence’, Cocksedge takes an old form – paper – and makes it into something new with new technology. The technology casts the material in a new light, gives it a new purchase on the imagination. As with ‘Coalescence’, the piece is about the ‘power of new technology’: the new forms that it can create, the new experiences and vision (the new sculpting of the wind). Similarly, ‘Coalescence’ has to be seen as a meditation on the superseding of fossil fuel by newer, cleaner, renewable fuels and the power and the experiences that they will generate to shape the world.
‘Living Watercolour Pavilion’
Thousands of translucent glass discs are overlaid to create a three-dimensional chromatic experience that changes according to shifting sun and shade.
Each of the colours chosen for the Expo 2020 Dubai UK Pavilion comes from the flag of an exhibiting nation, expressing unity, partnership and possibility.
A sculptural centrepiece envelops visitors in colour and light, giving the sense of an ‘impossible’ structure.
“We were drawn to the idea of looking outwards for inspiration. This informed the entire architecture of the pavilion, which we designed as a sculptural watercolour that plays with the natural environment to connect with people.” – Paul Cocksedge.
Suneel’s Comment: This beautiful and multi-coloured design which represents the unity of the nations of the world in the aegis of art explores the themes of togetherness and union that are evident in ‘Coalescence’ from its very title (which means a joining together to make a greater whole). As with ‘Coalescence’, the artist has taken single units and combined them to form something greater and impactful as art.
‘Poised’
Poised embodies the elegance and amenability of paper. Half a ton in weight, the steel table appears improbable upon investigation.
Intensive calculations into gravity, mass, and equilibrium mean the work is perfectly weighted and stable in spite of appearing ready to topple.
Suneel’s Comment: An investigation of fragility and resilience, just like the message of ‘Coalescence’ which is that the world is fragile at the moment but we can come together to make a new world of light which is resilient against any threats – even though it seems ‘impossible’ at the moment. A message of hope and the defeat of adversity – the enduring message of ‘Coalescence’. A tribute to the power of design and the artist’s imagination – the basic building block of design is the blank piece of paper, the strongest force in the human universe to create the world anew.
diary of a lone man 