Chatham Works – Nick Evans

Reviewed by Sophie Jongman

This wonderful exhibition is currently showing at the Nucleus Arts Centre Gallery in Chatham (272 High Street) until the 17^thNovember.

Chatham landmarks are clearly depicted with colour and drama. Chatham and its icons are boldly represented with fond familiarity and exuberant colours in their surround.

The artist selects just a few significant places, ones with presence and maybe their beauty somewhat hidden, such as the Brook Theatre.

Is this really our home town? Yes it is; not only the landmarks, but also the atmosphere and its not gloomy either, rather it’s exciting and dramatic.

Of course Chatham is not known as a beauty spot or for its artistic attributes, but at this exhibition, artist Nick Evans captures from his Chatham studio what we know and love about the town, so impressive are the outer representations, we can feel its familiarity and admire them too.

Chatham is not without its victims of life, it’s a hard town with a history of hardship, such that it was an inspiration for many of Dickens novels. Artist Nick Evans demonstrates an understanding and appreciation of this essence. In one corner of the Gallery; as you
travel around the paintings of our beloved town there are two people (opposite the painting of flowers) a man and a woman in separate paintings, they are naked. Their vulnerability for all to see, these are our Chatham people, a boy and a girl.

The two pictures bring to a close our journey through Chatham and there follows in the same style, paintings of beautiful places in Cornwall perhaps representing our dreams of escape.

It’s a wonderful and moving exhibition, one that tells a story (or three).

A guest post from Word to the Sophie, posted here with thanks.

Sedimental reviewed

Stephen Turner’s art, as tidal as the River Medway it explores in such depth, is fundamentally psychogeographic.  Turner’s work focuses on a continuing exploration of the river and its relationship with the people who live (and have lived) alongside it.   Human population and nature are conceived not as separate and competing identities,
but as a collaborative process.

This newest exhibited work, titled Sedimental, is a narrative made up of many layers.  An associated text suggests that Sedimental “examines threads interweaving geology with history, flora with fauna, hydrology and river archaeology, purity with contamination and other such contrasts”.

It does so with much emphasis on the successive deposits of the river itself.  Found objects – whether a plastic doll’s arm or crab shells from the shoreline – are collected and painstakingly catalogued.  Paints and pastels are manufactured from mud, chalk and driftwood and used to illustrate the ebb and flow of their origin.

At one point I found myself mesmerised by video shot with cameras that had been placed beneath the river surface.  The sky overlaid with water, overlaid in turn with the drift of flotsam, forms a visual rhythm that is meditative as well as fascinating.

There are layers, too, in the ongoing creation of this project, as further elements are developed through working with other artists and the local community.  In this sense,
at least, Sedimental is as much a portrayal of the Medway’s life in this particular moment as it is a reflection and summation of the river’s rich history.

Sedimental will be at the Visitor Information Centre in Rochester until 11^th November 2011, with a further installation being unveiled (following a panel discussion on a River Medway Manifesto) at Light Vessel 21 on 22^nd September.  There are many things to interest and inspire the psychogeographer, here; a visit is highly recommended.

Philip Kane

Rag Lady

Rag lady, that’s what the locals call her, as she pulls her bright red canvas shopping trolley through the streets.  A straw boater in summer, a knitted bobble hat in winter, she’s always careful to keep her waist length greying hair neatly in its plait.  Today, unusually, her socks match; pink striped knee highs which, she feels, complement the black gypsy skirt, yellow blouse and practical red mackintosh.

She’s off to work, where she can be found most days, always exuberant, always enthusiastic, behind the counter of the town’s charity shop.  Her work is her life, she needs it to survive.  It makes her feel part of the community, a community she doesn’t really understand, and that doesn’t understand her.  She strikes an imposing figure, of massive build, but her demeanor is that of a slow, unsure child.  She would never intentionally upset or scare anyone, although she secretly chuckles to herself when she thinks of her great-grandmother who, at one time, was the most notorious serial killer in England.

Today, she must face the people who don’t understand her, the people who will whisper behind her back.  It amuses her that people respond this way, just because she’s different.  She doesn’t know how to be upset, but there is a distinct sadness in her small, close-set sparkling eyes.

She puts the key in the lock to open the door and the oppressive smell of musty old clothes and books hits her nostrils.  She loves the smell, it feels like home.  The scent of old, discarded and unloved items that no one wants.  It reminds her of herself and she feels at ease. She turns the closed sign to open, removes her coat and with ruddy cheeks and a huge smile, she greets the first customer.

Vikki Thompson

Rare find in local charity shop

Last Thursday proved to be a very eventful day indeed for Mr Roger Penrose of Luton Road Chatham. Whilst rummaging for secondhand book bargains in the Chatham High Street branch of Oxfam, Mr Penrose found one of the only known copies of the Necronomicon, a mediaeval book of evil written by the mad Arab sorcerer Abdul al Hazred sometime in the middle ages.

 

“I knew it was old” said Mr Penrose “because most modern books are written on paper, whereas this one seemed to be written on cured human flesh.”

 

Although many later translations of the work exist, only three copies of the original manuscript are known. The whereabouts of this particular copy, lost at the time of the Third Crusade, has been a subject of fierce debate among historians for many years. Despite this, Mr Penrose says he had no idea of the books significance:

 

“I thought a fiver was a bit pricey for a second hand book” he said “I don’t usually like to spent more than about £2.75, but I decided it would look good on the sideboard, next to my Franklyn Mint figures.”

 

However, he decided to contact authorities the following week when a friend and neighbour – Mr Youseff Khan, also of Luton Road – saw the book and attempted to “stab him in the neck with a butter knife whilst screaming death to the vile necromancer and all his unholy works.” According to Mr Penrose this behaviour was “Quite out of sorts.”

 

The book is now in the care of the British Museum, under armed guard, where experts are studying it. A worker from the shop where the book was found, when asked how he felt that an object well known to be able to rent asunder the very fabric of reality, unleash ageless horrors upon the world, and inflict both irrevocable madness and cancer of the soul in any sane person, had found its way onto their shelves, commented: “Blimey, just goes to show you doesn’t it?”

Historians are asking that whoever donated the book, believed to have been left outside the shop in a carrier bag in with some old Dennis Wheatleys, contact the British Museum immediately.

Steven Gray

Rochester lion

Seahorse

The aluminium spider of a broken umbrella hangs in its black web among the branches of a tree.  A one-eyed bull prances on the bank of the river.  Leaves hiss.  Rain is burning away the pavements.  The startled face of an office chair looks out from a high office window.

I am naked but for the waistcoat of my tears.

O city of my birth, unhappy city, sacrificing your own children in your despair, your ghostly ziggurats piercing the rounded belly of the sky…

O city of death and family, tumbling from the valley slopes, breaking in long waves of grey into the crepuscular river…

O scabrous, raddled city, my dear and poisoned mother…

I swim like a seahorse through your asphalt veins.

Philip Kane