Category: Exhibitions

My name is Rachel Marsh, I’m a Gallery Assistant here at the De La Warr Pavilion, and I write fiction and poetry. I enjoy writing poems inspired by the exhibitions here, and I have written one inspired by my favourite artwork in the Zineb Sedira exhibition, which is the lightboxes. This piece is called Shattered Carcasses and Architecture of the Forsaken, and these photographs were taken in Nouadhibou, Mauritania.

I love this piece because the photographs are beautiful, and on a gloomy day or when it gets dark, they really glow and stand out in the gallery. The lightboxes echo the shape of the wrecks, and the wires on the floor look like the tangled ropes and nets we see in the photographs.

Yet even though the photographs are beautiful, they tell a sad story. Hundreds of boats have been left to rot here, and toxic chemicals seep from them into the sea, as well as the netting, which is disastrous for marine life. Yet even though this is a tragic situation, from the research I did there is a glimmer of hope because it has provided jobs in salvaging and nature is good at recovering so actually there are new ecosystems, birds, and fish that have adapted or are adapting to this, so that ‘glimmer of hope’, I wanted to add that in my poem as well.

But there is another dark side to this place. Nouadhibou is a popular destination for migrants to leave because it’s become too difficult to travel from other countries in North Africa. Leaving Nouadhibou to try and reach the Canary Islands is an incredibly dangerous route to go.

The title of my poem is called Swallow the Poison, and this title has two meanings. Firstly, in the literal sense of the toxic waste produced by these shipwrecks, but it is also meant as a metaphor. It’s almost like something written in a fairytale, like the poisoned apple in Snow White. For example, migrants who are tempted by and fed this ‘poison’ by people-smuggling gangs who take their life savings and promise them a glittering future. They assure them that there is no or little danger in making these perilous journeys via the sea or hidden in the back of trucks. Of course, that isn’t the case all the time, but it can be, and we’ve seen enough examples in the news of where these kinds of tragic events have occurred.

My poem is written in couplets, but I wanted the top line to be consistently shorter than the lower line. This gives the poem a shape, so the couplets themselves take the form of boats, echoing the meaning and subject of the poem.

---

SWALLOW THE POISON

 

Seawater laps the ships,

tastes the red rust and swallows the poison down.

 

White crumbling walls, a cloudless sky.

A gold and blue cemetery, where hundreds of boats go to die.

 

Flaking paint, oil and toxic waste.

The recipe produces a bitter, burning, acrid taste.

 

Silt and sand topped with treacle tar.

The vessels fall silent showing their fatal, final scars.

 

Sunlight glitters across the waves.

The sea accepts the corpses to their watery graves.

 

Lumps of metal, twisted chains.

The letters start to fade in the corroded remains.

 

Fraying ropes and shards of glass.

Decorate the dunes, wild flowers and grass.

 

Tangled wire and lime green nets.

Failed journeys, corruption, environmental regrets.

 

Yet a glimmer of hope in the graveyard cove.

A salvaging industry, new habitats, ecosystems grow.

 

But the boats now notice other people leave.

Preparing tiny crafts for a voyage across the open sea.

 

Unable to move from their shoreline graves,

they watch them depart, souls they are unable to save.

 

Open mouthed portholes gape,

as families full of hopes and dreams make their escape.

 

Passing the ships in the graveyard town,

they smile, pay the money and swallow the poison down.

---

Listen to a reading of the poem from Rachel here:

Have you ever had any dreams before?

The ones where there are no closed doors to happiness.

Where everything you wish for comes true,

and the sea you swim in is a fairytale shade of blue.

 

The dreams where we fly to a world of our own,

where we sit in a heavenly garden we’ve grown.

A pier that sits in the sky instead of the sea

when the lights of the city were far below me.

 

The dreams where we can see loved ones we’ve lost,

and every Christmas has a perfect white winter frost.

Where the sea has no plastic and the water is pure,

and we feel independent, safe and secure.

 

But the nightmares can creep in, disturbing our dreams.

Where everything we love falls apart at the seams.

Hearts can be broken, and we feel fear and pain,

and the unkind words are repeating again.

 

But we cannot allow nightmares to ruin our day.

Let’s remember the dreams where the fear goes away.

The dreams that remind us of how strong we are,

let’s keep them in a dreamcatcher memory jar.

 

Wellcome Collection

24 March – 29 August 2022

 

In February 2022, Wellcome Collection opens Rooted Beings, a major new exhibition reimagining our relationship with plants and fungi.

De La Warr Pavilion, Wellcome Collection and West Dean College are currently working with interdisciplinary designers RESOLVE on a major new commission, ‘Re-wilding: Coast, Countryside, City’. Making use of the rich resources and histories at each partner site, RESOLVE are investigating humanity’s entangled relationship with the vegetal world, inviting new perspectives on environmentalism and re/wilding, long-term thinking, and practical solutions to living equitably with others and with nature. By researching new and ancient approaches to land use while on residency at West Dean College they will use this knowledge and build collaborations with young people in Bexhill and London to create a new commission for inclusion in Wellcome Collection’s Rooted Beings exhibition in March 2022, and a solo exhibition at the De La Warr Pavilion in May 2022. You can read more about RESOLVE and the new commission in our recent post here.

As the current environmental crisis exposes the vital yet fragile connections between human and planetary health, this exhibition will present plants as so much more than simply a resource for human consumption, tools or even decoration. Through new artists commissions as well as botanical specimens and historic works, it will explore what we can learn from plant behaviour as we rethink the significance of these ancient, complex, and sensitive beings. Rooted Beings while encourage us to rethink the way we see plants and embrace wildness in our lifes, landscapes and hearts.

The theme of colonial violence and indigenous knowledges takes as a starting point the botanical specimens and information brought to Europe from Latin America in the 18th and 19th centuries during the scientific expeditions and housed in the archives of Wellcome Collection and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. This period saw an unprecedented moment of global expansion in knowledge, trade and industrialisation, which happened at the expense of indigenous cultures being erased and ecosystems destroyed. Both artists’ works demand a move beyond this instrumental approach to the living world, instead reasserting the role of plants in nurturing our ecosystems and our imagination.

Patricia Domínguez‘s new commission Matrix Vegetal, produced in collaboration with Delfina Foundation, will bring together experimental research on ethnobotany (the study of how people from particular areas or cultures use indigenous plants), healing practices, and the commercialisation of wellbeing. The installation will feature five futuristic totems displaying botanical reproductions from Wellcome’s collection and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, honouring the narratives of violence and healing embodied by the displayed material.

Joseca, a Yanomami artist from the Amazon rainforest, produces detailed drawings that combine images of shamanic plant spirits, summoned to restore health and fight off disease, with scenes from daily life in the forest. Joseca’s drawings from the collection of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris) illustrate the significance of trees as central to the ecosystem that supports human and non-human life.

Simultaneously, installations by Eduardo Navarro, Gözde Ilki, Ingela Ihrman, explore the theme of symbiosis and what can be learnt from plant behaviour and our complex interdependence with the vegetal world. Eduardo Navarro‘s commission The Photosynthetics comprises a series of drawings on biodegradable paper envelopes containing the seeds of London plane trees that, after the exhibition closes, will be returned to the soil activating the seeds within. In collaboration with philosopher Michael Marder, Navarro has produced a series of instructions showing how to experience the exhibition as a plant, inviting us to embark on a journey towards vegetal enlightenment.

Meanwhile Gözde Ilkin will present As the roots spoke, the cracks deepened, a series of hand–sewn textiles expanding her interest in plant intelligence and interspecies symbiosis creating visions that transcend human, animal and plant categories; and Ingela Ihrman’s A Great Seaweed Day, inspired by the artist’s love of swimming in the sea will propose a deep connection between the ecosystems of the oceans and the human bodies. The seaweed sculptures suggest links between her intestinal flora and marine flora. Ihrman will also present The Passion Flower, a costume activated by the artist in a performance where the audience pollinated the plant by drinking ‘ nectar’ from the flower, an act of intimacy and attraction.

Some key highlight historical objects include: a 19th Century textile depicting Jambūdvīpa, the central continent of the middle world in Jain cosmology; illustrations from John Ernest Weavers’ The Ecological Relations of Roots; and an Egyptian papyrus from 400AD thought to be the earliest fragment in existence of an illustrated herbal for medical purposes.

Finally, the theme of wilding encourages us to break down the artificial wall between nature and culture to ‘rewild’ our land and our minds through new commissions by Sop and RESOLVE Collective.

Artist Sop returns to Wellcome Collection to present The Den 3, a new installation where Sop narrates the process of constructing a secret den in the wood near their house in London, as they were shielding during the Covid-19 pandemic. It reveals how their relationship with the woods chimes with their experience of illness, finding solace in the longevity of nature set against our relatively fleeting human lives. And finally, in collaboration with Wellcome Collection Youth Programme, De La Warr Pavilion and West Dean College of Arts and Conservation, RESOLVE Collective will present a new commission which will take the form of action-research programme inviting young people to think through ideas around stewardship, racialised privilege, and colonial histories in the UK countryside.

Exhibition curator Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz said:

“Rooted Beings proposes a space to meditate on our relationship with the natural world and its impact on ecosystems, our liveliness and our health. The exhibition is essentially an entanglement of collections and artists projects that invite us to embark on a meditative reflection on plant life and what we can learn from it: to be rooted, attentive, flexible and caring – to attain vegetal wisdom.”

Rooted Beings is presented at Wellcome Collection from 24 February to 29 August 2022. It is curated by Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz with Emily Sargent, and it is a collaboration between Wellcome Collection and La Casa Encendida, Madrid. Commission partners: Delfina Foundation, De La Warr Pavilion, West Dean College of Arts and Conservation.

The exhibition is accompanied by ‘This Book is a Plant: How to Grow, Learn and Radically Engage with the Natural World’, published by Wellcome Collection and Profile Books.

 

For further press information and images please contact: Juan Sánchez, Media Manager, Wellcome Collection

E: j.sanchez@wellcome.org | T: +44 207 611 8820 | W: wellcomecollection.org/press

 

NOTES TO EDITORS

Visitor information

• Rooted Beings opens 24 February until 29 August 2022.
• Admission to Wellcome Collection is free.
• Opening Hours: Tuesday to Sunday 10.00 to 18.00, closed Mondays. • Address: Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road NW1 2BE

Accompanying Publication

This Book is a Plant: How to Grow, Learn and Radically Engage with the Natural World is a new Wellcome Collection title which accompanies the major exhibition Rooted Beings. We’ve become used to thinking of plants as things for us to use, as food, tools, resources, or just as an attractive background to our own lives. But it’s time to change our minds. New research shows that plants can think, plan, and may even have memories. We share our planet with beings whose potential we have only glimpsed. Featuring the writing of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Susie Orbach and Merlin Sheldrake, This Book is a Plant will be your handbook to the new reality: showing you a pathway to completely reimagine your relationship with a different kind of natural world. Delve into a world of moss and fungi: Sheila Watt-Cloutier transports us to the Arctic Spring, Sumana Roy invites us into a world of bamboo and Bengali poetry, and Rebecca Tamás puts roots down through earth and soil. This Book is a Plant is made from paper: it was once part of a tree. But it’s also a seed: the first shoots of a radical new way of seeing the world around you.

About La Casa Encendida, Madrid

La Casa Encendida, Madrid, is a social and cultural centre managed by Fundación Montemadrid, a dynamic space open to audiences of all ages and persuasions where visitors can find some of today’s most groundbreaking artistic expressions as well as educational, philosophical and debating activities that revolve around the centre’s four main spheres of action: Arts, Solidarity, Environment and Education.

About Andreas Lechthaler Architecture – Exhibition Designers

Andreas Lechthale Architecture work at the interface between art, architecture and public space. They create complementing and highly individual settings for art experiences and help artists realise their vision. Their practice works across many scales, from public space, gallery and museum design through to exhibition architecture and furniture design. All interventions are driven from a desire to create coherent, subtle and multisensory spaces that create holistic environments which allow personal interaction and a sense of wonder and unnoticed enhancement. Recent commissions include “Kusama –A Retrospective” at Gropius Bau Berlin, “Pipilotti Rist” at L.A. Moca, “The Soho Photography Quarter” for Westminster and On Happiness at Wellcome Collection.

About Wellcome Collection

Wellcome Collection is a free museum and library exploring health and human experience. Its vision is to challenge how we all think and feel about health by connecting science, medicine, life and art. It offers changing curated exhibitions, museum and library collections, public events, in addition to a shop, restaurant and café. Wellcome Collection publishes books on what it means to be human, and collaborates widely to reach broad and diverse audiences, locally and globally.

Wellcome Collection actively develops and preserves collections for current and future audiences and, where possible, offers new narratives about health and the human condition. The museum and library work to engage underrepresented audiences, including deaf, disabled, neurodivergent, and racially minoritised communities.

Wellcome Collection is part of Wellcome which supports science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone. We support discovery research into life, health and wellbeing, and we’re taking on three worldwide health challenges: mental health, global heating and infectious diseases. We are a politically and financially independent foundation.

 

Social Media

Twitter: @ExploreWellcome

Instagram: @wellcomecollection

Facebook: @wellcomecollection

 

#RootedBeings

On International Women’s Day, we celebrate the bravery and determination of the women of Chile whose menfolk were detained/disappeared under the Pinochet regime.

By coming together in stitching workshops, the women recorded the crimes of the dictatorship, and the resulting arpilleras became an archive of a history that the government tried to suppress. The women found strength and solidarity through the arpillera-making and became activists, finding courage together in their quest to discover what happened to their loved ones.

Rossana Leal of the Refugee Buddy Project Hastings, Rother and Wealden, Jimena Pardo and Janey Moffat from Stitch For Change continue this work, with the storytelling element of the arpillera craft as the tool to tell stories and come together under lockdown.

Rossana Leal – Founder & Director, The Refugee Buddy Project and Co-ordinator of Stitch for Change

Telling our own stories is a fundamental part of the work of the Refugee Buddy Project. This can often be a very difficult thing to do because we are not often given the chance to tell our stories. When we do, as a refugees, our stories are questioned often challenged and hung out to dry by the hostile environment which puts into question and makes public everything about our lives. For this reason, the storytelling element of the arpillera craft seemed so right, as the tool we needed to both tell our stories and come together under lockdown. The Stitch for Change sessions gave us a chance to think about what we were experiencing, what we wanted to say, how we wanted to say it and how we wanted to present it. We would show each other our finished pieces and talk about what we had made. We connected, we cried, we talked and we looked after each other. Most importantly, we told our stories of lockdown 2020, the way we wanted to.

Jimena Pardo – Stitch for Change Facilitator

During the Stitch for Change project, the main connections I wanted to explore were around the Chilean arpilleras being a form of solidarity. Growing up as a Chilean refugee, I came into contact with Arpilleras that arrived from Chile to be sold in the UK as solidarity art. The context of the dictatorship within which the arpilleras were made in the 70s and 80s has now shifted and around the world, arpilleras are made as a way of remembering events as well as a textile testimony. In Stitch for Change, we wanted to make a record of the pandemic, the fear, loss, uncertainty, and also the kindness that has been shown during this lockdown. Covid 19 has no borders and across many continents, we have seen the stark inequalities laid bare because of it. The arpilleras aesthetic and symbolism holds that ability to speak of terrible things but in a way that also speaks of the humanity and hope within us and that is why I relate so strongly with them.

Janey Moffatt – Stitch For Change Facilitator

March 2020 felt like no other month in time; a whirlwind of chaotic emotions, fears and uncertainty as the world faced the Covid 19 Pandemic and went into lockdown.

It felt appropriate to respond to the situation by being flexible, available, nurturing, containing; hence our decision to carry Stitch For Change forward during this challenging time using the tools that were available to us.  We instinctively felt that participants would need the project more than ever as a way to rest and unravel in a safe space.  It felt like a mature reaction and I felt proud of our joint decisions as co-facilitators after the sessions had been carried out.

I learned a lot about the subtlety of important change and growth in individuals and the necessity of examining projects qualitatively rather than quantitatively.  I had a tendency to focus on the latter in the past, feeling the need for numbers and results in order to prove the validity of my work.  I’ve had a deep shift in my awareness that it’s unethical to view a human being only as a number or statistic – and this type of number crunching is a skewed way of evaluating work amongst humans.

The project has helped me to feel deeply connected to others who use stitch to mark any of the wide expanse of human emotion and experience – from the people who made Arpilleras to those who have stitched in psychiatric hospitals and prisons.  It has given me a sense of my place in history, and the feeling that I stand in one tiny spot of a vast network of time.

 

Read more about the exhibitions All In The Same Storm: Pandemic Patchwork Stories using the button below.

 

Image from original footage contained in Scraps of Life 28 minutes film produced by Gayla Jamison, 1992, Lightfoot Films, Inc.
With permission of the producer, © Conflict Textiles

Plus Tate has announced that the De La Warr Pavilion and 12 other visual arts organisations will join their network, taking the cohort of member organisations across the country to 48.

Rosie Cooper, our Head of Exhibitions says “We are thrilled to be part of the newest cohort of Plus Tate members. As an organisation that needs to be incredibly resourceful to present such an ambitious programme of new commissions, exhibitions and learning, it is invaluable for us to be connected to such a strong network of organisations across the UK who we can share learning and ideas with. It is a challenging time for the arts, and organisations are being held accountable in important ways. Working together with common purpose, we can create meaningful change.”

Launched in 2010, Plus Tate shares collections and expertise to build a network that exchanges knowledge, skills and resources to strengthen the contemporary visual arts ecology in the UK. The announcement comes alongside news that Tate has moved its national partnerships department to Liverpool under director Helen Legg.

The new members range in size and include universities, collection-based galleries and non-venue organisations, all with a commitment to better reflecting their local communities and developing close connections with a range of audiences. Among the new Plus Tate partners are Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), whose programme reflects on the social and political impact of globalisation; DASH, a disabled-led organisation that creates opportunities for disabled artists to develop their creative practice; Void, a contemporary art space commissioning a diverse range of artistic practices which places participation, engagement and learning at its heart; and Autograph, which explores identity, representation, human rights and social justice through photography and film.

The reach of the network across the UK is demonstrated by its new members, with two galleries in Dundee and four in London, along with a host of institutions across northern England, galleries in southern coastal towns and another in Derry~Londonderry.

The new Plus Tate partners are: Autograph, Gasworks, Iniva and The Showroom in London; Cooper Gallery and Dundee Contemporary Arts in Dundee; DASH in Shropshire; De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea; Focal Point Gallery in Southend-on-Sea; Leeds Art Gallery; New Art Exchange in Nottingham; Site Gallery in Sheffield; and Void in Derry~Londonderry. Manchester Art Gallery will also join its sister gallery, the Whitworth, as part of the network.

The 13 new Plus Tate partners join the existing network of 35 organisations, which are:

Artes Mundi, Arnolfini, BALTIC, Camden Arts Centre, Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry, Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester, Chisenhale Gallery, Firstsite, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Glynn Vivian, Grizedale Arts, Golden Thread Gallery, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, John Hansard Gallery, The Hepworth, HOME, Ikon, Kettle’s Yard, Liverpool Biennial, The MAC Belfast, mima, MK Gallery, Modern Art Oxford, MOSTYN, Newlyn Art Gallery and the Exchange, The Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Nottingham Contemporary, The Pier Arts Centre, the South London Gallery, Spike Island, Towner, Turner Contemporary, Whitworth Art Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre and the four Tate galleries.

“May 16th, 1941” Grace Pailthorpe (1883-1971), 1941. Photo © Tate. Presented as part of A Tale of Mother’s Bones: Grace Pailthorpe, Reuben Mednikoff and the Birth of Psychorealism, De La Warr Pavilion, 2018.