Gladly Beyond – Ten Obstructions

Gladly Beyond is an exploration, a journey.

Ten Obstructions embrace the opportunity for the experimentation that Rogue Project Space offers. The title comes from ee cummings, himself a radical experimenter with form: ‘somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience’.

Gladly Beyond journeys literally, visually and imaginatively through time and through space. It explores the possibilities of visual representation: through light, through simplification of form, or by playing with scale. It delves into the nature of perception, the process of looking, the connections and dialogue between this portrayal and the natural world – capturing a feeling, a pulsing life essence.

Journeys of the imagination take us from fabled and mythic magical gardens to speculative fictions. We leave behind the fabrications and constructs that justify existing hierarchies, inequalities and the inexorable march of man-made climate change. The voyage brings the viewer quickly to issues of caring and interdependence: concern for the vulnerable and displaced; care for the planet and for each other – existences intertwined.

Travelling through space, landscape blurs to the point of abstraction, traversing the elements of air, land and water beyond the horizon. The journey halts a moment to recognise those who have fled the safety – and danger – of home, only to encounter new perils. Travelling through time: as witnesses of the future past, or of change and transition, travelling into the post-apocalyptic, or from this world to the next. Time becomes cyclical: growth, maturity, death and decay, and the work becomes ongoing – process made public.

Maya Chowdhry’s interactive experience – temp/o~reality explores the measuring of time through objects, as you travel through the idea that if time exists as humans have delineated, then it’s running out.

In Garden Meditations Jane Fairhurst explores light through colour, form and texture and the subject of plants, specifically garden plants. She plays around with scale and simplify the shapes of leaves and flowers to capture the feel of the garden, the pulsing life essence that is growth but that is ultimately doomed to die or retreat, or perhaps, like Persephone, to return with the spring.

The garden has been the subject of artists work since the first gardens were conceptualised and realised in ancient times. The garden is a reverie of all civilizations. The western mind eternally desires a return to the fabled garden of Eden. It is a place to watch and wait as our climate changes. Will it become, like the mythical Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a place imagined, dreamed of and yet unknown? Ultimately, the garden remains only whilst the gardener is there to tend it. The painting remains as witness to a time past. The painting goes ‘gladly beyond’.

On the Periphery: Sarah Feinmann is fascinated by edgeland spaces that have been abandoned and left to deteriorate over time. It is the overlooked in the landscape that inspires her work. She records these aspects on her journeys, using photography to document these moments of change and transition. The edgeland paintings are created on a random arrangement of papers, that accentuate the texture, marks and fluidity of the paint. They examine such aspects as railway sidings and doorways in derelict buildings. She was struck by an overwhelming yellow of the passing landscape when travelling by train, and the indistinct shapes of architectural structures. She constructs abstract painted collages, by painting blocks of colour with textural surfaces that relate to the edgeland landscapes. They explore the connection between visual representation and the natural world. The abstract pieces are exhibited alongside the edgeland paintings, to reinforce the connections and create a dialogue between them.

In Sabrina Fuller’s The Power of Fragility the rich and powerful have departed in a fleet of spaceships, taking with them the beautiful and the functional. They leave the supposedly dying planet Earth sparsely populated by those who are not deemed useful to society. Those left behind unite around a single, radical task: to care for the planet and for each other.

Speculative fiction gives us the opportunity to imagine a world built according to our own values. It opens us up to seeing the-way-things-are, how existing power relationships and the structures that maintain them, are themselves a fabrication, a social construct. Speculative fiction offers an escape from our taken-for-granted reality: allowing us to set out our visions of how things could be.

Visitors found a trunk containing traces of the world those who remained had built in the future. Visitors were requested to explore these vestiges and to contribute their own thoughts, ideas and dreams.

Claire Hignett makes protective blankets and artefacts to explore emotions connected to feeling safe, vulnerable and unsafe. Not In Safekeeping: Missing is new work created for Gladly Beyond. Claire aims to construct 200+ knitted milk cartons representing the 200+ children missing from Home Office asylum hotels in the UK. This is an enormous and seemingly endless task – representing the enormity of the situation – and will be ongoing during the exhibition as part performance, part making in public.

Christoper Rainham’s Wings Become Waves is inspired by the poem ‘Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond’ which speaks to him of a state of being wholly dependent on the interaction of another: that your existence is totally entwined with theirs. He has recently seen some photographs of an archaeological dig in Denmark from 1975. Several graves were discovered dating from Mesolithic times including one of a young woman and a still-born child. The child had been placed on a swan’s wing in the grave.
For the Saami people of Northern Europe the Swan is seen as a messenger from the Gods, due in part from its ability to move between states of water, land and air.
He thought of this child, not only cocooned by the wing but transported on it from this world to the next. These drawings are an attempt to investigate his responses to this.