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Ruth EwanIt Rains, It Rains 20.06 — 22.09.2019
On the cover:
Ruth Ewan, We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted to Be, 2011.
Courtesy Rob Tufnell, London/Cologne. Photo: © Andy Keate
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GENERALINFORMATION
EXHIBITION
Ruth Ewan: It Rains, It Rains20.06 – 22.09.2019Nave of the CAPC
CURATOR
Alice Motardassisted by Alice Cavender and Émeline Vincent
PRESS PREVIEW
Wednesday, June 19th 2019 at 10.30 am
OPENING
Wednesday, June 19th 2019 at 7 pm
This exhibition is part of the cultural season Liberté ! Bordeaux 2019
EXHIBITION PARTNERS
In collaboration with Jardin Botanique de Bordeaux; Centre de production végétale mutualisé, Direction des espaces verts, Direction générale haute qualité de vie de Bordeaux Métropole.
With loans from Amorim France; Château Haut-Bailly; Collections de biologie animale de l'Université de Bordeaux; Guillaume Devoyon; Écomusée de la vigne et du vin, Gradignan; Écomusée de Marquèze, Parc naturel régional des Landes de Gascogne; Frac Champagne-Ardenne; Pierre Grangé-Praderas; Jean-Louis Hillairet; MisSa Blue; Musée André Voulgre, Musée des arts et traditions populaires du Périgord; Musée d'Aquitaine, ville de Bordeaux; Musée Basque et de l’histoire de Bayonne; UF Sciences de la Terre et de l’Environnement, Université de Bordeaux; unité de recherche PACEA (De la Préhistoire à l’Actuel : Culture, Environnement et Anthropologie), Université de Bordeaux, CNRS and Ministère de la Culture; Valcadis.
Patron: TRUFFAUT.
With the support of Creative Scotland and Fluxus Art Projects, a Franco-British programme for contemporary art supported by the French Ministry of Culture, the Institut Français and the British Council.
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Republican calendar [Year II (22 September 1793)]: [engraving] / drawn by Philibert-Louis Debucourt (1755-1832)
Source gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France
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It Rains, It Rains
It Rains, It Rains, the first solo exhibition of the Scottish artist Ruth Ewan in France, borrows its title from the folk song ‘Il pleut, il pleut, bergère’ written by the French revolutionary poet, actor and politician Fabre d’Églantine, who is said to have calmly recited the lyrics before his execution in 1794.
Ewan’s exhibition comprises the installation Back to the Fields, first shown in 2015 and entirely reconfigured for the CAPC’s iconic nave, as well as a series of objects connected to the French Republican calendar.
The Republican calendar was adopted by the Convention in 1793, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, to replace the Gregorian calendar. Embodying and carrying the Republican ideals directly into the life of every citizen, it was in use for twelve years. It completed the dismantling of the Ancien Régime by reorganising time itself.
According to the idea that with the advent of the Revolution, ‘time opens a new book to history’, the weeks and months of the year were restructured by a parliamentary commission comprised of artists, poets, scientists and horticulturists, among whom D’Églantine and the mathematician Gilbert Romme. The days of the week and the seasons were renamed in order to evoke nature and agricultural life, and the names of the months each referred to one aspect of French climate (e.g. Brumaire, from the French word for ‘mist’, or Pluviôse, for ‘rain’) or an important moment in peasant life (e.g. Vendémiaire, referring to the grape harvest, or Germinal, for ‘germination’). Replacing the Saints of the traditional calendar, each day was furthermore named after an agricultural product, a plant, a mineral, an animal or a tool.
Back to the Fields
The installation Back to the Fields reactivates the rural calendar as a three-dimensional, life-size work. It takes the shape of a tangible calendar composed of the 360 objects representing the Republican year: lettuce, cart, wax, turnip, honey, fir, ivy, figs, mercury, lava, moss, pheasant etc.
The Republican calendar comprises twelve months of thirty days. Each month is divided into three weeks, each week comprising ten days. The Sunday rest day of the Ancien Régime is replaced by a day off every ten days (which might explain the ultimate failure of the calendar). The remaining five days of the year (six in leap years) are called the sans-culottides, or ‘complementary days’.
Back to the Fields was shown at Camden Arts Centre in London in 2015 and at the São Paulo Biennial
in 2016.
The sans-culottides
The sans-culottides – named after the sans-culottes, the radicals of the revolutionary period between 1792 and 1794 – relate to ideas or qualities: Virtue, Talent, Labour, Conviction, Honour, Revolution. To represent them, Ewan presents six works that emphasise their cyclical nature, whether by referring to the seasonal patterns of nature, agricultural rhythms, the phenomenon of reflection, the measurement of time or the menstrual cycle of the female body.
PRESS RELEASE
Texts by Ruth Ewan and Alice Motard
Bordeaux, June 2019
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1. Virtue
Mothers’ Meeting (We Are the Ones Who Make Up for the Losses at War)
These were the words written on the banners held up by pregnant women who followed the processions accompanying the plantation of liberty trees in post-revolutionary France. The country, then at war with Austria, was seized by patriotic fervour and keen to defend the achievements of the Revolution. This is when the tree, an ancestral symbol of fertility, also became a strong image for the revolutionary ideal.
Mothers’ Meeting is a collection of nursing chairs from different periods, on which visitors are invited to sit. Nursing chairs are one of the only pieces of domestic furniture to have been designed specifically to fit the proportions and function of the female body. They were used for breastfeeding, their low seating encouraging interaction with children. This type of chair was mainly found in upper-class homes, which typically employed wet nurses to feed their babies, a common practice up until the 20th century.
The title of this work refers to the largely invisible history of women in the Revolution and to the unacknowledged emotional and physical labour of mothers, which the artist associates with the notion of Virtue. The chairs are arranged in a circle, subverting their original purpose and encouraging women to congregate, speak and be publicly visible.
2. Talent
Female Sword Swallowers Moon Calendar by MisSa Blue
The idea of Talent is embodied by a collection of swords created by the female sword swallower MisSa Blue, one of the leading figures of the contemporary Sideshow and Neo-Burlesque scene.
After a life threatening accident during one of her performances, MisSa Blue designed and commissioned a complete set of swords to be used on different days of her menstrual cycle. (The oesophagus and the uterus swell on the first day of menstruation, which is what caused the injury.)
The set includes 28 swords of different lengths that follow the lunar calendar. Two swords appear only once in the set: a bladeless sword resembling the new moon, and the longest sword, which corresponds to the full moon. The longest sword is to be swallowed on ovulation day when the female body is blooming and no sword should be swallowed on the first day of menstruation as it is the most dangerous day for a female sword swallower to get hurt.
This piece was originally commissioned to tour with the show Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman in the UK.
3. Labour
We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted to Be
The concept of Labour is materialised by a decimal clock whose dial displays ten instead of twelve hours. The decimal regulation echoes the historic attempt to redefine and rationalise the day. Concurrent to the Republican calendar, France introduced a new system of time measurement liberated from the monarchy and Christianity, and temporarily lived to the rhythm of the decimal second. In decimal
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time, the day is divided into ten periods rather than twenty-four. Midnight becomes ten o’clock, midday becomes five o’clock, each new hour contains one hundred minutes, and each new minute contains one hundred seconds.Ewan’s decimal clock recalls the historic function of the building that houses the CAPC, a colonial warehouse built in 1824 and used for over a century to store coffee, vanilla, sugar, cocoa, cotton, indigo, rum, wine, cereals, cod, dried fruits, spices etc. An archival photograph from the 1950s shows a clock overlooking the nave, defining the workers’ day. Ewan’s decimal clock replaces the one seen in the picture.
We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted to Be is part of a series of decimal clocks conceived by
the artist as part of a commission by the 2011 Folkstone Triennial curated by Andrea Schlieker.
4. Conviction
Mirrors for Princes
Mirrors for Princes is a series of pub style mirrors created with Artisan Artworks, a traditional sign writer based near Glasgow. The mirrors feature texts channeling the ancient call for social equality and justice. The words are derived from sources including the 18th century feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, the 14th century radical itinerant priest John Ball and the 19th century French anarcho-feminist Louise Michel (1830–1905), a major figure of the Paris Commune, who ran a libertarian school in London at the end of a turbulent life as an activist. Her struggles resonate with many issues raised in Ewan’s works: the question of teaching (Michel was a passionate teacher, filling her class with music, nature and animals), education and art for all, and more generally her commitment to a ‘social revolution’.
The English expression ‘mirrors for princes’ furthermore refers to a literary genre that outlines the basic principles of conduct for rulers as well as the structure and purpose of secular power.
5. Honour
Bow Down to None
For the fifth sans-culottide, Ewan invites visitors to use a coin press that transforms coins into exonumia, a token of non-legal tender. Normally found in tourist destinations, the penny press flattens and stretches coins, transforming their intended form and erasing the original image on the coin. Tokens are created referencing the history of money, particularly the ‘sling of grapeshot’ pay packet of the working classes, once exchanged for labour in the nave of CAPC. Ewan is interested in the idea of money as a form of monument and the press references the act of destroying this and repurposing the raw material into a token capable of transmitting a message and perhaps reentering into circulation.
The title Bow Down to None refers to Tom Anderson (1863–1947), a recurring figure in Ewan’s work. Anderson started a movement of Proletarian Schools in Glasgow in 1918 in the wake of the Socialist Sunday Schools. A free-thinker and union activist but also an accomplished musician and poet, for over thirty years he taught children the virtues of independence, the power to think for themselves and the meaning of socialist revolution. The title is based on his precepts, enjoining the students of these schools of socialist inspiration to be courteous to all but to submit to no one.
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PUBLICATION
6. Revolution
Anti-Rota Fortunæ (No More Acceptance of Fate)
According to Silvia Federici, a scholar, teacher and activist who wrote about the transition from feudalism to capitalism (Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation), the image of the wheel of fortune appeared in medieval Europe during periods of social upheaval. A simple painted wooden construction, the ‘antiwheel of fortune’ designed by Ewan to embody the 366th day of the year – the day of Revolution in leap years – celebrates the concept of equality so dear to the Republicans. It bears the inscription ALL EQUAL BY NATURE.
Title: Ruth Ewan
The catalogue of It Rains, It Rains will be published in a series of books launched in 2017 by the CAPC, devoted to the installations exhibited in the museum’s nave over the past 40 years. Including a large amount of exhibition views, this 64-page book will also feature an interview with Ruth Ewan conducted by Alice Motard.
Graphic design: Studio Manuel RaederRetail price: 29 €Distribution: Les Presses du Réel
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Ruth Ewan
Ruth Ewan (b.1980, Aberdeen) is an artist based in Glasgow. Exhibitions of her work have been presented at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Yorkshire (2019); Camden Arts Centre, London (2015); Tate Britain and Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (with Astrid Johnston) (2014 and 2013); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, the Glasgow International and the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2012); Dundee Contemporary Arts and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville (2011); ICA, London (2008); Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland (2007) and Studio Voltaire, London (2006). She has developed projects for High Line; New York (2019); Edinburgh Art Festival (2018); Glasgow Women’s Library (2018); Book Works (2017); Cambridge University (2016); Vital Arts (2015); Create (2012); Art on the Underground (2011); Frieze Projects (2009) and Artangel (2007). Her work has also been included in survey exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2018); the 32nd São Paulo Biennial (2016); the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw and Tate Liverpool (2013) and the New Museum, New York (2009). In 2016 she was awarded the Arts Foundation Yoma Sasburg Award for Art in Urban Space.
Ruth Ewan’s work assumes diverse forms including events, installation and printed matter. Her practice explores overlooked historic figures and movements, bringing to light radical ideals in order to question how we might live today. Mostly working in a site-responsive way, many of her projects have been devised with and for specific public-realm settings such as schools, libraries, hospitals and city streets. Often engaging with others, Ewan’s projects involve a process of focused research and close collaboration – in the past she has worked with historians, traditional crafts people, horticulturalists, archaeologists, architects, composers, bakers, magicians and children to create projects.
BIOGRAPHY
Portrait of Ruth Ewan, June 2019Photo: Arthur Péquin
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LIST OF WORKS PRESENTED
Back to the Fields2015 / 2016 / 2019Mixed media Variable dimensions
In collaboration with: Jardin Botanique de Bordeaux; Centre de production végétale mutualisé, Direction des espaces verts, Direction générale haute qualité de vie de Bordeaux Métropole.
With loans from: Amorim France; Château Haut- Bailly; Collections de biologie animale de l'Université de Bordeaux; Guillaume Devoyon; Écomusée de la Vigne et du Vin, Gradignan; Écomusée de Marquèze, Parc naturel régional des Landes de Gascogne; Frac Champagne-Ardenne; Pierre Grangé-Praderas; Jean-Louis Hillairet; Musée André Voulgre, Musée des arts et traditions populaires du Périgord; Musée d'Aquitaine, ville de Bordeaux; Musée Basque et de l’histoire de Bayonne; UF Sciences de la Terre et de l’Environnement, Université de Bordeaux; Unité de recherche PACEA (De la Préhistoire à l’Actuel: Culture, Environnement et Anthropologie), Université de Bordeaux, CNRS et ministère de la Culture; Valcadis.
Patron: TRUFFAUT.
With the support of Creative Scotland and Fluxus Art Projects.
Mothers’ Meeting (We Are the Ones Who Make Up for the Losses at War)2019Antique nursing chairsVariable dimensionsCourtesy the artist & Rob Tufnell, London/Cologne
Female Sword Swallowers Moon Calendar by MisSa Blue2016Stainless steelFrom 20 cm to 60 cm Courtesy MisSa Blue
We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted to Be2011Decimal clockDiameter 76 cmCollection FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims
Mirrors for Princes2019Painted and glue-chipped mirrors120 x 80 cm eachCourtesy the artist & Rob Tufnell, London/Cologne
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Bow Down to None2019Coin press and painted wood170 x 60 x 50 cmCourtesy the artist & Rob Tufnell, London/Cologne
Anti-Rota Fortunae (No More Acceptance of Fate)2019Painted wood with acrylic inlay119,5 cm diameter, 198 cm heightCourtesy the artist & Rob Tufnell, London/Cologne
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IMAGES AVAILABLE FOR THE PRESS
IMAGE 1
Ruth Ewan, We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted to Be, 2011Courtesy the artist and Rob Tufnell, London/Cologne.Photo: © Andy Keate
IMAGE 2
Ruth Ewan, Back to the Fields, 2015Exhibition view at Camden Arts Centre, London, 2015Courtesy the artist and Rob Tufnell,London/Cologne. Photo: © Hydar Dewachi
IMAGE 3
Ruth Ewan, Back to the Fields, 2015Exhibition view at Camden Arts Centre, London, 2015Courtesy the artist and Rob Tufnell, London/Cologne.Photo: © Marcus Leith
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THEY SUPPORT US
SUEZ, Château Chasse-Spleen, Château Haut Selve
OUR PATRONS
THE ASSOCIATION OF THE FRIENDS OF THE CAPC
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PRATICALINFORMATION
* For more information please visit www.capc-bordeaux.fr
OPENING TIMES
Museum and Shop From Tuesday to Sunday – 11 am to 6 pm extended hours every second Wednesday of the month until 8 pmClosed on Mondays and Public holidays except July 14th and August 15th
CAPC: T. + 33 (0)5 56 00 81 50Shop: T. +33 (0)5 56 00 81 69
Café du Musée (restaurant) From Tuesday to Friday – 11 am to 5:30 pm, Saturday – 11 am to 5 pm, Sunday – 11:30 am to 5 pmContact and Booking: T. +33 (0)5 56 06 35 70
LibraryBy appointmentT. +33 (0)5 56 00 81 58
ADMISSION FEES
7 € full rate (5 €, applicable fees when no exhibition in the nave)4 € reduced rate* (3 €)Free on conditions*
Free entrance every first Sunday of the month (except in July and August)
HOW TO GET THERE
Tram Line B, Stop CAPC Line C, Stop Jardin public
BusLines 4, 5N, 6, 15 et 29, Stop Jardin public
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Pedro Jiménez MorrásHead of Press and & communicationCAPC musée d'art contemporain de BordeauxT. +33 (0)5 56 00 81 70 (direct)Mob. +33 (0)6 71 12 79 [email protected]
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