The work of Flo Brooks spans painting, collage, drawing and sculpture. His works represent numerous thoughts, experiences and themes that are often autobiographical, referencing family, communities and coming-of-age.

Bringing together notions of cleanliness, normativity and morality by way of dramatised satirical fiction, the artist explores the ways the body is manipulated through the lens of hygiene.

YessSIR! Back off! Tell me who l am again?! and Butts Only (that's the sound that lonely makes), both 2018, were made on the occasion of the artist’s first solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, Scrubbers. The show consisted of five works that described a fictional commercial cleaning company working its way through a number of familiar institutional spaces – a public toilet, gym, a psychotherapy room – punctuated by coffee and cigarette breaks.

The spaces represented in the paintings are those Brooks traversed during his own hormone transition and mental health support, and describe particular hygienic acts he’s exercised in a bid to recover his ‘authentic’ gendered, material and psychic self. Checkered with uncertainty, they feel more like spaces of entrapment and desperation. People, objects, architecture and motifs are deliberately arranged in the works to convey a frantic tension.

Brooks uses irony to mock the fact that the hygienic practices and commodities promising us ever easier, clean, authentic, and better ways to be so often lead to economic hardship and poor mental health.

YessSIR! Back off! Tell me who l am again features in Kiss My Genders at Hayward Gallery this summer. This group exhibition celebrates more than 30 international artists whose work explores and engages with gender identity.

Kiss My Genders is at Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre from 12 June until 8 September 2019.

This month, Amy Tobin, Lecturer in History of Art, University of Cambridge and Curator, Kettle’s Yard, explores the work of Rose Finn-Kelcey, featured in the latest Arts Council Collection touring exhibition Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945.

Rose Finn-Kelcey’s work stages material collisions that pose universal problems. In her early work this often concerned the disparities between being a woman and being an artist, in her later work she expanded her questioning to broader, humanist problems like the difference between monetary and aesthetic value, or the sacred and the profane.

God’s Bog (2001) very much engages with the latter, this jesmonite sculpture combines an enlarged shell with a toilet. The two have merged together as if mutated. The toilet’s smooth, pristine white is made beautiful by becoming shell-like, and vice versa, the curving form of the shell is disfigured and made abject by the toilet form and its scatological associations. Perhaps the sculpture reminds us of the impact of our civilised society on the natural world, or perhaps the suturing of the two elements, reminds us of our connectedness to the world at the most basic level. 

This month, Dr Sophie Bowness, art historian and Trustee of The Hepworth Estate, explores the work of Barbara Hepworth, whose work, Icon, 1957 features in the latest Arts Council Collection touring exhibition, Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945.

Hepworth had a special feeling for wood. She preferred hardwoods such as African guarea and mahogany, from which Icon is carved, for the resistance they offered. Icon is characterised by a rich, warm, reddish brown colouring, a high polish and a marked grain that lends a particular life to the work. It was carved at a pivotal moment in Hepworth’s career, immediately after the remarkable series of guarea wood sculptures of 1954–56, and early in her adoption of sheet metal and bronze. Icon was bought by the Arts Council of Great Britain from the first exhibition it was shown in, which was held at the Gimpel Fils gallery in London in 1958.

Hepworth made fifteen carvings in mahogany, ceasing to use it after 1957. She worked in Honduras, Spanish and West African mahogany. Icon is closely related to two contemporary mahogany carvings, which are both stringed - Wood and Strings (Fugue), in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and Pierced Form (Toledo). In Icon interior and exterior are in harmonious counterpoint, while there is a bold asymmetry to the form.

‘Icon’ is the Greek word for ‘image’ and is one of a number of Greek titles found in Hepworth’s work. Her visit to Greece in 1954 marked her deeply. She was particular about her choice of words and enjoyed finding the right titles for works.

This month Sophie Ridsdale-Smith looks at the work of Barbara Walker, whose work features in Unquiet Moments: Capturing the Everyday, an online exhibition realised by The Courtauld Institute of Art’s 2020 MA Curating the Art Museum programme.

Social documentary has always been of great interest to Barbara Walker, whose work captures moments in communities or families that would often go unnoticed. She has described her large-scale paintings as ‘snapshots in time’, captured through the language of painting.

Walker's two paintings Boundary I and Boundary II are part of a body of work called Private Face. Consisting of 34 works of art, Private Face presents the artist’s own observation and experience of the black community in Birmingham. Walker makes it clear that her work aims to challenge the negative stereotypes and misunderstandings that surround the African-Caribbean community in mainstream media. She does so by entering and documenting scenes that may seem mundane and ‘pedestrian’ in order to expose the beauty and that resides there.

Boundary I and Boundary II resulted from Walker’s time spent in barber shops across Handsworth, photographing and documenting the people that she saw. Before painting, she built trust between herself and her subjects, aware of her ‘outsider’ status as a woman entering a male space. Choosing two photographs from 40 or so she captured, Walker translated these intimate moments onto large canvases. The scale of these works is significant as they are intended to dominate the gallery space, prioritising the visibility of these everyday narratives.

Despite dealing with similar subject matters, Boundary I and Boundary II are very different in their approach to colour. Boundary I has a limited colour palette creating a sense of calm and mutual respect between the two figures. The use of sepia tones in Boundary II, on the other hand, is reminiscent of old photographs. In doing so, Walker wanted to communicate the long history of barber shops in Handsworth and to evoke memory.

Sophie Ridsdale-Smith is one of the nine curators of Unquiet Moments: Capturing the Everyday,  an online exhibition from the MA Curating the Art Museum students at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

This month Cat Gibbard, Programme Curator at Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange looks at the work of Gavin Jantjes, whose work features in National Partners Programme Exhibition, Go On Being So.

Gavin Jantjes was born in District Six, Cape Town, South Africa in 1948. In 1976 he briefly moved to London and worked with the Poster Collective, a politically motivated group producing posters and banners in response to the miners’ strike and conflicts in Vietnam and Ireland. Jantjes’ A South African Colouring Book, a set of anti-apartheid screen prints, was exhibited at the ICA in London.

His exhibition coincided with the infamous 1976 Soweto Uprising in which students between the ages of 10 to 17 protested against the implementation of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction for their lessons rather than the student’s home languages. An estimated 20,000 young people took part nationwide.They were met with fierce police brutality. The number of fatalities has never been confirmed but 150 was the figure most frequently given.
 

Seated Nude, Arms Raised (1954) and Back of Kneeling Woman (1954) feature in the Arts Council Collection Touring Exhibition The Printed Line which is at Worcester Art Gallery, until 14 November before continuing its UK tour.

These two small drypoints were made while Frank Auerbach was still a student at the Royal College of Art in London. To make them he set a nail into a pen-holder and scratched into pieces of zinc alloy. They were then printed by laying the plate under a sheet of dampened paper and rubbing the back with a spoon.

As Craig Hartley has written, 'For Auerbach, the process of redrawing a subject is always one of rethinking and reformulation, and in this case the move from one medium to another, from charcoal drawing to drypoint print, involved shifting the modulations of shading and volume. But something of the richness of the charcoal line is retained by the soft burr of ink trapped by the rough edges of the scratched line.'

The Arts Council Collection owns a number of paintings and drawings by Auerbach from over several decades.  Find out more here.

Paul Maheke’s Tropicalité, l'Île et l'Exote, 2014 will be the next film to feature in the current National Partners Programme exhibition Selected Films From the Arts Council Collection at Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance.

Through the gallery’s ongoing partnership with the Intercom Trust, young LGBTQIA+ people have selected a series of artists’ films from the Arts Council Collection that give voice to individuals and communities whose views are often overlooked.

Paul Maheke has a varied and often collaborative approach to his artistic practice. He has recently worked with performance and video to create works that disrupt representations of queer Blackness, which have grown out of Western discourses. His current research imagines the body as an archive: a territory with its own cartography, using it physically as a pathway to information and knowledge in order to address how memory and identity are formed and constituted. 

Maheke explains “these works are often bathed in colourful lights and set in motion by pulsating soundtracks. They embrace a multiplicity of logics and voices...I regularly collaborate with music makers, producers, choreographers, performers and dancers. I intend for the environments I craft to be experienced as poetic yet political spaces where the body is purposed as a site for resilience”.

Tropicalité, l'Île et l'Exote, 2014 is a silent French/English subtitled video, which considers the notion of islands and bodies as colonised spaces and territories as well as possible sites of resistance. Featuring sweeping seascapes and glorious marine life, the footage was shot on the artificial island of Vassivière in France, and the tropical French overseas region of La Réunion in the Indian Ocean. The view later switches to the artist performing a spirited, seemingly improvised dance inside what appears to be an empty swimming pool. The piece describes the empowerment and decolonisation of one's body, as well as exploring concepts such as otherness, exoticism and subjectivity.

Following Evan Ifekoya’s The Gender Song, Paul Maheke’s film will be available to watch on their website as part of the National Partners Programme Exhibition Selected Films From the Arts Council Collection. 

Jananne Al-Ani’s photograph series Untitled, 1998 is included in the National Partners Programme exhibition My name is not Refugee at Firstsite, Colchester.

Over the past year a group of refugees and asylum seekers have worked together with Firstsite staff and Refugee Action Colchester to create an exhibition of artworks from the Arts Council Collection. 

My name is not Refugee is an opportunity to see past the label of ‘refugee’ and, whilst acknowledging the conflict or trauma which may have been experienced, instead focus on the lives of the contributors before and after arriving in the UK. The exhibition reveals commonalities between visitors to the exhibition and the first-time curators, creating a greater understanding about our community, finding out what we all share and how we are all connected.

Jananne- Al-Ani is an artist, researcher and lecturer who works with photography, film and video, initially beginning her career as a painter. Her work often features members of her immediate family and explores the power of testimony and the documentary tradition, through intimate recollections of absence and loss in contrast with official accounts of historic events.

Her early photographic work explores issues of gender, politics and the representation of women within a historical narrative of colonialism, especially the fetished veiled body of Middle Eastern and North African women in Orientalist paintings and photographs, as seen in the work Untitled, 1998. Adopting the conventions of early photographic studio portraiture, the five women of Al-Ani’s family (the artist herself, her mother and her sisters) are formally posed in this group portrait, dressed in traditional Arabic and Westen clothing.

This month we focus on Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry, whose major Arts Council Collection work, The Vanity of Small Differences, will tour venues across the UK over the next 12 months and is currently on show as part of Newlyn Art Gallery’s latest National Partners Programme Exhibition, until January 2021.

Grayson Perry is a great chronicler of contemporary life, drawing us in with wit, affecting sentiment and nostalgia as well as, at times, fear and anger. In his work, Perry tackles subjects that are universally human: identity, gender, social status, sexuality, religion. Autobiographical references – to the artist’s childhood, his family and his transvestism – can be read in tandem with questions about décor and decorum, class and taste, and the status of the artist versus that of the artisan.

The Vanity of Small Differences tells the story of class mobility and the influence social class has on our aesthetic taste. Inspired by William Hogarth's 'A Rake's Progress' the six tapestries, measuring 2m x 4m each, chart the 'class journey' made by young Tim Rakewell and include many of the characters, incidents and objects Grayson Perry encountered on journeys through Sunderland, Tunbridge Wells and The Cotswolds for the television series 'All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry'.

This month’s Artist Profile, written by Sage Kema, Intern at the Arts Council Collection, focuses on artist David Medalla and his work seminal participatory artwork, A Stitch in Time, currently on display at the Southbank Centre, until 18 July 2021.

In a career spanning nearly seven decades, Philippines-born international artist Medalla is recognised as a pioneering world figure in kinetic, installation and participatory art. Medalla established himself in the avant-garde art scene when he arrived in Britain in 1960. That same year, Medalla exhibited the first of his Cloud Canyons sculptures; the coiling and wreathing sculptures were formed out of soap bubble machines, which British curator Guy Brett (1989) came to consider Medalla’s “Kinetic” phase. During the mid to late 60’s Medalla art practice began to incorporate relational aesthetics, in particular, pioneering participatory art; Brett calls this Medalla’s “Participation” phase. 

A Stitch in Time is one of the best-known artworks of the genre Participatory Art. Participatory art is relational art, which involves audience participation, wherein the artwork is made as a collaboration with the public, usually through a process where the public interacts with materials given by the artist and/or each other. Medalla called his participatory art, ‘participation-production-propulsions’, and in the case of A Stitch in Time, the installation considers how a person’s individual experience can become subject to public dialogue and consideration.