Garry Barker 'False Starts' Exhibition

'False Starts' was an important exhibition as far as my own practice was concerned, because it brought together several different strands of my visual research and allowed me to think about how I could use more performative approaches to art making alongside the more traditional gallery exhibition display. I was calling it 'False Starts' because it felt like I was beginning all over again.

Exhibition opened 6pm to 8pm Friday October the 19th. There were drawings, ceramics and prints on display. All of which in various ways were related to getting older and I was looking at mixing between my own story and the stories of others, always looking to develop something equivalent to that moment of epiphany, or divine realisation, that can come when you contemplate ordinary things for long enough. 

The invite was developed from a linoprint I had made in response to having a frozen shoulder. The print was both an image to remind me of how as you get older you seem to get more and more aches and pains and something supposed to act like a votive. If I could transfer my pain into it, the idea was that the pain would go away from my shoulder. Once the pain had been transferred the idea was to then burn the print in a special ceramic oven based on a Roman design. It had a small chimney which meant oxygen was quickly used up and the fire would go out leaving the print only partly burnt. The remains were then framed as a visual reminder. 

The foot and hand containers were made out of ceramic to hold the burnt remains of prints. 

A framed 'burnt' print

Prints in production

'Leg' with radiating pain lino print.

I made prints of several parts of the body and they were made available for people to buy very cheaply and then if on buying one, they wanted to use them to cure a pain, I would burn them. 
However the votives that really took off were ceramic ones. I had made quite a lot of these including ones for toothache. The idea was that you held the ceramic as tightly as possible in your hand and as the rough edges of the fired clay began to hurt the pain in your tooth  would transfer and go away. 

Toothache votive 

I made ceramics for fingers, arms, legs, eyes, nose bleeds, wounds, operation scars, sore throats and anything else people told me they needed curing. 

Operation scar

A few of the many variations of body parts made as ceramic votives

It was however the toothache votives that seemed to do the trick. The most important thing was though that as I became more involved with this, I seemed to be fulfilling some sort of need. I know dentists are the last places people want to go to, but I hadn't realised how many people had been struck off their NHS dentist because they had failed to attend an appointment. I also began to develop short texts to go with the votive objects when I presented them, this one for a ceramic version of a frozen shoulder. 

Dear..........,

This is your personalised votive

It not just represents your shoulder

It is your shoulder

When you get home, find a quiet moment

Look at it

Think about your pain and try to mentally transfer it into 

your new ceramic shoulder

Do this as well as you can

You can hang it on the wall, 

Put it on a shelf 

or 

Lay it down

There is no right way 

As the pain goes you can either move the votive to some other place or smash it and bury the parts

XXXXX

The person that bought this ceramic frozen shoulder votive reported back that the pain went away after two days. 

This is a drawing for a ceramic votive that was never made

But this was only one aspect of the exhibition, it was however the aspect that seemed at the time to have a lot of potential for future development.

The exhibition was divided into two rooms, the votives were in the first room and the second room was devoted to representations of the ageing body in conjunction with its memories. The experiences I have had about a gradually developing arthritis as I get older, together with my slowly changing memory patterns, were fused with imagery developed in response to me talking to other people as they get older. In particular I had recently joined the group, 'Life hacks for a limited future' a small group of professional people who are all getting older and who wish to face this fact together, rather than as isolated individuals. So in many ways I was becoming an ageing 'professional', or an artist that was more and more drawn to the process of ageing as a subject matter. Because there is an architect in the group who is keen to visualise needs, I was also keen to help develop other supportive resources. The diagrams that I drew as part of a process of trying to visualise what was happening, were as far as I was concerned, just as much 'art', as the more emotive realisations. 

A diagram I made for 'Life hacks...' of the ageing process in the form of a scarab beetle

The main part of the exhibition was centred around this drawing below, which is approximately five feet wide. 

The drawing represents the ageing body as a landscape. In this case it has embodied within it two sets of fused memories. Those of my reminiscence of a particular place in Dudley in the West Midlands of England, a place of huge pigs and slag heaps together with memories told me by a neighbour, of a time when she was a girl who lived on the island of St Kitts and of how she ran everywhere and was called, 'Three speed grey dove'. 

Detail: Huge pigs peer over walls

Detail: The runner nears home

Detail: Shooting targets

Detail: Mythic island

The drawing went through several stages and its final form was suggested after a phone call from my cousin, who reminded me that when he used to sleep over as a boy he always brought with him a soft toy octopus, a toy I really envied. I therefore decided to make it from memory in ceramic and embed it in the drawing. 

Final image with ceramic octopus embedded. 

I made lots of variations of body forms, often thinking about the body's weight and of how as you get older you seem to carry your body and not simply inhabit. Sometimes my imagery was about how if you are not careful your body feels as if it is slipping away from you and you need to pull it back on. At other times I was trying to get across the idea of the body as this lump that needs scratching to give itself relief. 

Studio view when the work was in process

An attempt to visualise the way old knees no longer feel as if they belong to you, they become islands in foreign seas. 

The way your hand becomes incapable of gripping things properly. 

I am sometimes short of breath and these paper bag pieces (above) seemed a simple way of visualising this. I then made ceramic versions which didn't seem to be right, but the ceramic of an arthritic hand did. Sometimes it's useful to switch between two and three dimensional thinking, if an idea isn't working in one it might in the other. 

A detail of the runner from the image above perhaps gives an indication of what was happening in some of the drawings as they became more about scale and of how insignificant you can feel as a young boy or girl when outside in the landscape. Gradually though the landscape and the body became interchangeable, both becoming places to inhabit. 

The exhibition has given me serious food for thought and I continue to look at possible projects that might help me visualise this process of getting older. 

See also:

(im)Material Disarray: Another exhibition

The votives project

Drawing and healing