George Storm Fletcher, one of our standout Ones to Watch artists in 2023, made a return visit for this year’s Ones to Watch exhibition, which wrapped up this April. George explored the show and shared their thoughts. Here’s what they had to say…
Now in it’s twelfth year, Ones to Watch showcases emerging artists from across Yorkshire. This year the selectors were Karanjit Panesar, Gill Crawshaw and Helen Moore.
I am greeted by Twinkle and Eshan Mojavers’ series of thirty wooden colour blocks, Two Voices, One Vision. Theirs is a clear and strong gesture – each panel is painted in a different warm hue. These reflect on the skyscapes, environments and palettes of the artist’s respective home countries of India and Iran. We are atmospherically transported from grey Yorkshire to another part of the world. Farsley is uncharacteristically sunny on the day I visit, and yet the strength of locality in this work remains true, we all seek the familiarities of home, but can find this comfort for ourselves, or self-create it. A representational image of ‘home’ is not required here, home is taken to be a feeling.
To the right, looming above us, in thick threatening thread is Orpheus and The Red-Shod Shades from Alegria Repila Smith. Scavenged objects from around Leeds, become fairytale iconography. Within this series of threatening shapes, a crown becomes a bear trap; whilst strange instruments announce the works arrival in the space. There is an exquisite material enjoyment that we can derive from the textures and shapes of the metal. I almost wish the work was closer to me so that I can enjoy the details, but it is tantamount to the piece that it is just out of reach.
Unassumingly installed below a window, hanging modestly but self-assuredly, is Hedgerows, Heresy and Hoodlum, a tapestry by Izzie Hinton Smith. A kind of meta-installation, the curation of the hang reflects Smith’s principal point – that (just like the hedgerows) that which is around us, (ie. the landscape) is that which is valuable. Ones To Watch always rolls around in the spring, and perhaps this is why I feel drawn to this work. Spring is the time that the world regenerates, it is a second chance at a fresh start, after the indiscretions and disappointments of the New Year. An accompanying Zine, a manifesto of sorts, explains through storytelling the importance of what is happening to our countrysides, and why it is politically relevant: ‘As the landscape has been tamed, so have we.’ Folklore is presented as ‘the connective tissue between us as humans and the living landscape we inhabit,’ as something radical that should bind us together. Amongst the themes mentioned above, of home and belonging, this work succinctly ties all these ideas together.
At the back of Smith’s zine is a jubilant descriptor of some of the iconography one can find within the work. The word accessible is topical, but this is a true example of how artists can actively engage their audiences. The diagrams and drawings describing the work do not explain away Smith’s work, rather they further reiterate the point: that these traditions, icons and meanings are things that we are losing (in urban sprawl, globalisation, Anglicisation and colonialism) and therefore the tools that people need to rediscover the stories must be provided and reintroduced. In Farsley, this work is well suited, Sunny Bank Mills itself is an example of a place that has had to reinvent itself to survive. It is an aesthetically rich, and conceptually sound, example of how illustration and printmaking belong within the visual arts.
Atiyya Mirza’s brilliantly named Great Women Chilling is installed in a form of diptych with Smith’s work, but in this case an abstract domestic scene hangs next to the electric blue shelf. The pages of Mirza’s book invitingly flop open to heartwarming scenes of women ‘Chilling’, in chairs, on floors, in front of the TV; together. Mirza’s ‘greatness’ is something that doesn’t need to be earnt, it is secure, and safe. There is something simultaneous about the fabric’s used to create the work, Mirza’s Pakistani background, and the location of Sunny Bank Mills, an old cloth store. An energy hums as I flick through the pages of Mirza’s book. Reading both Mirza and Smith’s works cover to cover, they have successfully overcome the age-old issue of ‘not touching things in galleries.’
To the right, Linda Cassel’s piece reminds me of the boats of Huw Locke (On the Tethys Sea, 2017.) Cassels has listed ‘history’ as a material; It is a bold decision, but one that is logical, as I am being engaged in a new act of story-telling. Suspended in front of a window, pointed wooden objects (perhaps old milling equipment?) directionally gravitate to the outside. History here is an unstable but powerful material, in contrast to the gentle visual of Cassel’s suspended mixed media piece.
Continuing around towards the door, I meet Paul Emsell’s work; a self-taught artist, he asserts using a ‘cosmology of sorts.’ In Solar Tree, a box-form, mixed media piece, there is a self-evident joy in making. Gloss paint pools into the recesses of what appears to be tree bark. Metal wires are used, sturdy but not taut, as though they have grown into these shapes, free from manipulation. Emsell’s is the sort of piece one would like to live with, with a composition that could withstand witnessing many days.
As a trans person, I am usually very cynical when it comes to representational, or ‘educational’ works surrounding gender, but when I met Miles Dyson’s tearjerking children’s book, My Mother Named Me Twice, I was moved. The story exemplifies how naming, and the changing of one’s name, is an example of self-worth and determinism, qualities that we all must learn, not just trans kids.
As I leave the exhibition, the threatening gaze of the goat, against the resolved stare of the artist, in Olivia Hawkswell’s painting, The Goat, The Bad and The Ugly, confronts me directly, as if to say, ‘come on then!’
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