Open Your Art
It’s a great experience for me to be taking part in a unique art trail at a south London rail station. The bleak track and platforms at South Croydon (which, notwithstanding some minor adaptations, was built in its current form in 1899) have seen record numbers of people taking and attempting to take their own lives. The Southern railway company approached the Croydon branch of Studio Upstairs, to provide a public art initiative that might help create an atmosphere of connection, vibrancy and kinship.
Suicide rates in recent years have been rising in proportion to growing poverty, instability in employment, housing crisis, divisive benefit misery and discrimination gaps – all exacerbated by the handling of the Covid pandemic by the UK government. To me this expresses the desperation and hazard that characterises life for many in Tory Britain. Even Labour’s shadow mental health minister has acknowledged that suicide is a result of social inequality as well as public health failure.
Under the leadership of studio manager Genevieve Collier, we worked on bringing some 25 pieces of work in textiles, text art, paintings, drawings and collage to the station – see them all here. The 2-D pieces were photographed, printed and mounted by local art workers who wanted to support Open Your Art. I’m proud that my suggested slogan became the show’s title.
My contributions to the trail are You Have Done Nothing Wrong (shown at the top of this post) which was installed on Platform 2, brilliantly visible from the ticket office! – and Tree Question (shown below with my friend Sandra, her beautiful painting, and other artist contributors) placed alongside about 12 other studio members’ pictures in the beautiful waiting room on Platform 1.
Open Your Art is public art. You Have Done Nothing Wrong has been exhibited in a gallery, at the Loft Gallery in Croydon Arts Store, before the pandemic. Seeing the work at the station reminds me how controlled our public spaces are, how undemocratic in the way they shape our consciousness and our sense of place in the social system. Graffiti and flyposting are illegal – eco-crimes. And yet social exclusion and cleansing are ‘public’ policies.
The accessibility of the public display at South Croydon Station also brings to mind how public and private art galleries create rarified space, and sense of being separate from historical and socio economic relationships. Where everything floats apparently freely in non-hierarchical white space which, even if it is free to visit, requires social knowledge and connection – as well as ramps, braille, audio describing and captions and wheelchairs – to be accessible. To be honest, most gallery labelling is too small for anyone over 50 to read. And where inequality is denied. Public cultural institutions are attempting to de-colonise by admitting the racist truth of their foundations in the Atlantic slave trade. I would like to see total decolonisation: the open showing of how things are made and maintained: the corporate backing from arms, oil and mining multinationals, the forced labour, the minimum wages, the pay gaps, the zero hours contracts, the workplace accidents and the impoverishment of people through redundancies in galleries and museums.
I remember the making of You have Done Nothing Wrong. It was fast and furious, taking no more than 30 minutes or so to formulate, choose materials and inscribe. It was a sudden, intense impulse that threw me into action to make this simple statement, and say it loud. The oil pastels, the inks, the choice of colours, the sureness to dip compressed charcoal in water and, with deep black marks, ram home the message; the emphatic qualification of putting the word ‘wrong’ in red and in parenthesis – all of it pure instinct in the moment.
The moment came at the end of a Tuesday at Studio Upstairs, in the autumn of 2019, during a period of what was, for me, searingly obsessive worry and embodied grief in the midst of an extended, unfolding family breakdown and estrangement after the death of a close relative. In the months after I finished the piece I realised it had also erupted as a culmination of decades of internalised shame, sexism and homophobia.
It was an expression of trauma and a representation of trauma. A physical gesture, a cultural mark and a depiction of rebellion.
I was expressing my own internally violent resistance to being scapegoated, regarded as ‘weird’, ‘abnormal’, ‘no help’ and ‘a troublemaker’ both during the months since my loved one had died, and since childhood. I was realising that my intentions and efforts were good, and telling myself so, as perhaps a loving parent might do, and as dear friends had tried to do many times before. This time it was felt, not just thought, and finally said, or blurted out. I had never managed more than rambling, inconclusive passages when trying to write about my experiences. This expression was whole and complete. Definitive and decisive. Five words on one page.
And yet I could not say ‘I’. I said ‘You’. In her book The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical: Negotiated Truths, my research supervisor and friend Meg Jensen discusses the processes of bearing witness to traumatic events and experiences. She explores the difficulties in telling a story of trauma: the difficulty with memory and remembering; the construction of vulnerability and victimhood; struggling for coherence and against fragmentation; knowledge; motivation; being heard and finding an audience or witness to one’s witnessing and survival. The question of the narrator is also problematic. Who am/is ‘I’? I needed to know and to say that ‘I’ had done nothing wrong. The disorientated, bewildered child within me that had never grown beyond guilt and disorientation was themself an entity I was compelled to address as ‘You’. And in inscribing ‘You’, I opened my heart and addressed all children who are afraid of making a mistake, making themselves unlovable, or invoking punishment and humiliation. This was a spiritual connection, not an intellectual choice.
As a child, I hated ‘I’ books: books written in the first person. Is that a widespread aversion amongst children? Reflecting now I wonder if my own damaged sense of self, a sense of being a hollow object, meant I could not bear the self-annihilation of identifying with a narrator. I was too busy struggling to live and tell my own self.
I have often felt that the effects of narcissistic abuse can only be healed externally, by the world changing through recognition and the ending of denial. For me this would be the final chapter in capitalism’s mythology that, aside from a minority of drastic examples, the institution of the family is, properly functioning, a happy place of unconditional love and support. As a Marxist, and a mark-maker, I understand the family to be a site of oppression, domestic abuse, danger and dysfunction – where the arts, crafts and sciences of childrearing are privatised and privately endured. A highly contradictory institution that requires systemic change.
As for ‘The Department of Compassion‘, I felt in my moment, that there needed to be such a thing! There needs to be a department of compassion in every institution, organisation, community, school, university. Humans are vulnerable. Anyone who thinks they are not is not being fully human and is liable to to be cruel to themselves, and then to others. We see these coming from the top. It also shapes our consciousness, with or without power. I know this from personal experience. I was 45 before I took in that self-compassion was different from self-pity.
What about Tree Question?
For those who can hear, who need to hear, trees are speaking, healing, embracing, living and giving life. When I get into a tree and draw what it says, I am alive. I don’t feel hollow. I don’t feel I am an object.
Open Your Art is running indefinitely at South Croydon Rail Station and is free to all.
You Have Done Nothing Wrong and Tree Question are available as numbered fine-art prints via my online gallery shop on this site.
