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EdgElands

Day Bowman

Dan Coombs

Marguerite Horner

Barbara Howey

Lee Maelzer

Sean Williams

Opening night event including Dance Performance: Thursday 14th April 2016, 6:00 – 8:00 pm

Following event: Thursday 21st April 2016, 6:00 – 7:30 pm ‘In Conversation’ evening with Iain Sinclair and Nick Papadimitriou:

St. Marylebone Parish Church Crypt 17 Marylebone Road London NW1 5LT

Monday – Friday 9:00 – 5:00 pm Saturday 9:00 - 4:00 pm (Sunday closed) 14th April – 30th June 2016

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Opening night event including Dance Performance: Thursday 14th April 2016, 6:00 – 8:00 pm

Following event: Thursday 21st April 2016, 6:00 – 7:30 pm ‘In Conversation’ evening with Iain Sinclair and Nick Papadimitriou:

St. Marylebone Parish Church Crypt 17 Marylebone Road London NW1 5LT

Monday – Friday 9:00 – 5:00 pm Saturday 9:00 - 4:00 pm (Sunday closed) 14th April – 30th June 2016Very occasionally the crypt closes for private meetings, please phone ahead to check times if you are making a special journey, to avoid disappointment on: 020 7935 7315 or 07809 330592.

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EdgElands

Day Bowman

Dan Coombs

Marguerite Horner

Barbara Howey

Lee Maelzer

Sean Williams

An investigation and celebration into the forgotten and overlooked

places on the edge of urban living through painting, dance,

music and spoken word

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‘Edgelands’ – a name dreamt up some 20 years ago to describe aspects of the changing face of Britain.

Perhaps the first literary attempt to capture the essence of the idea was Iain Sinclair’s evocative account of a journey round the M25, London Orbital. For Paul Farley and Michael Symmons-Roberts, co-authors of the book Edgelands, these places are the great ‘unnamed and ignored landscapes…places where our slipstream has created a zone of inattention’ and yet it is here where all manner of interest and beauty thrive.

With this exhibition, it is the first time that these forgotten corners of our landscape are celebrated in painting, dance, music and spoken word; a truly exciting cross-arts project for London and the regions.

The exhibition will open at:

The Crypt Gallery, St. Marylebone Parish Church, London 14 April – 30 June 2016.

The work will tour to Aberystwyth Arts Centre; Gloucester City Museum and Art Gallery; Hartlepool Art Gallery and Beverley Museum and Art Gallery during 2016-17.

Day Bowman

Curator: day@daybowman. com +44(0) 7968 692 761

FORE WORDEDGELANDS – a cross-arts touring exhibition

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Day Bowman Dan Coombs Marguerite Horner

Barbara Howey

Lee Maelzer Sean Williams

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Are human beings an expression of their landscape? Not just affected by the spirit of place, but something more finely calibrated? A character in Lawrence Durrell’s great novel sequence The Alexandria Quartet proposes that: ‘Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time – not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.’ And elsewhere Durrell writes of ‘the city which used us as its flora – precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!’ As much, perhaps, may be said of any city and its environs.

Edgelands are the transitional, liminal areas to be found on the boundaries of country and town, the borderlands between real town and real country. A useful definition is offered by Robert Macfarlane in his excellent book Landmarks (2015): ‘London’s edgelands today comprise jittery, jumbled ground: utilities infrastructure and haulage depots, crackling substations and allotments, scrub forests and sluggish canals, slackened regulatory frameworks and guerrilla ecologies.’ Of course we have no need or wish to limit ourselves to London, for edgelands everywhere partake of similar characteristics. Some tellingly call it ‘drosscape’, but it is by no means new, nor even

newly observed. In 1862 Victor Hugo described it as ‘bastard countryside’ or ‘terrain vague’, and in 1883 Richard Jefferies wrote extensively about the ‘frontier line to civilisation’. Currently it is the focus not only of writers but of artists and psychogeographers.

Psychogeography is the study of how the physical environment affects the emotions and behaviour of individuals. It’s also about how to generate a new awareness of the urban landscape. It proposes a new synthesis of art and technology, which may involve celebration or critique. A number of issues are raised: is it possible to communicate the personal meaning that a landscape or cityscape has for us? The imagery may be decipherable, but what about its import? Ideally, the subjective is brought into confrontation with the objective in a new reconnaissance (survey, preliminary inspection) of the soul as the template of the art object.

♦ There has long been a flavour of pilgrimage in Day Bowman’s work, of travel in space as much as travel in time - back and forth through the candescent archaeology of her imagery…

♦ Dan Coombs begins with collages of multiple figure groups in a strange landscape-like setting, and keeps moving his photocopied and distorted

MARGINS & WASTE PL ACES

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figures around this painted arena until all the intervals are right and they lock into position…

♦ For Marguerite Horner, every painting starts from a moment of reverie, when something seen feels more than usually significant. She has built up a huge photographic archive of stilled moments, many of them taken on an American road trip more than 20 years ago…

♦ Barbara Howey also uses photographs, sometimes her own, or images fielded from the internet, and canalizes their anonymity to build richly associative and painterly images of streets, petrol stations and car parks at night…

♦ Lee Maelzer sometimes treats her photographic source material with chemicals to break down both composition and colour, and she is especially drawn to abandoned spaces and heaped detritus…

♦ Sean Williams makes pixelated paintings, his dabs and dots of paint echoing the breakdown (or make-up) of digital imagery…

… Andrew Lambirth February-March 2016

… Andrew’s full essay text can be read in the printed Edgelands Catalogue – which will be available at all the exhibitions taking place during 2016-17 at:

♦ St. Marylebone Parish Church Crypt.

♦ Aberystwyth Arts Centre.

♦ Hartlepool Art Gallery.

♦ Alison Richards Building, Cambridge University.

♦ Gloucester City Museum and Art Gallery.

♦ Beverley Museum and Art Gallery.

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LKR & Co

Lizzi Kew Ross is a choreographer and the director of LKR & Co…

Alice Sara is a dance artist and a long-term member of Seven Sisters Group…

Megan Saunders is currently the rehearsal director of Tilted Productions…

Suzie Holmes is Head of Costume and Lecturer in Performance Design at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance…

Choreographer’s note on the dance piece for Edgelands exhibition – slipstream space

The act of devising a dance piece is, for me, always a collaborative conversation…

Michael Berkeley’s piece for viola gives a taut atmospheric world for the dancers to inhabit. LKR

www.Lizzikewrossandco.co.uk

Supported by

Alice Sara & Megan Saunders in slipstream spacephotographer Justin Piperger

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MICHAEL BERKELE y

Michael Berkeley was born in 1948, the eldest son of the composer Sir Lennox Berkeley and a godson of Benjamin Britten…

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Iain Sinclair has lived in (and written about) Hackney, East London, since 1969…

IA IN SINCL AIR

Nick Papadimitriou was born in Middlesex in 1958 and studied Philosophy and European Literature at Middlesex University…

NICK PAPADIMITRIOU

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First published in 2016 in Great Britain by Jeremiah Publications © Copyright the individual authors.

Works shown by:

Day Bowman Dan Coombs Marguerite Horner Barbara Howey Lee Maelzer Sean Williams

Who all assert moral their rights to be identified as the authors of this work.

The artists acknowledge the support of the Contemporary British Painting Group and founder member Robert Priseman.

Artwork photography by Jusin Piperger Catalogue design by Brian Whitehead Printed by Richard Hagan at RHDC.Co.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holders in writing.

The printed publication: ISBN: 978-0-9546283-3-8

… Full written text can be read in the printed Edgelands Catalogue – which will be available at all the exhibitions taking place during 2016-17 at:

♦ St. Marylebone Parish Church Crypt.

♦ Aberystwyth Arts Centre.

♦ Hartlepool Art Gallery.

♦ Alison Richards Building, Cambridge University.

♦ Gloucester City Museum and Art Gallery.

♦ Beverley Museum and Art Gallery.