Figurant at Strange Parade

A mesmerising audiovisual performance at Strange Parade in Nunhead last month (28 February 2026), with Inga Tillere's film piece accompanied by words from Johny Brown (of Band of Holy Joy) and musical accompaniment from Mark Beazley (bass) and Jono Podmore (theremin and other sounds).

'Figurant' is centred around the 'discarded fragments of space and time' embodied in a found 8mm film from 1960s Elmer in West Sussex. Tillere treated the film by leaving it submerged in the River Ravensbourne by Lewisham Hospital, recovering it later, and meticulously scanning it frame by frame.

Super 8 film is always uncanny as a dead, flickering medium carrying memories from at a time when moving images of ordinary people were rare. The effect was doubled by its Ravensbourne wash, bringing out unexpected colours that heighten rather than completely obscure its English seaside footage from 60 years ago. 

I have recently had some old super 8 film digitised, having not viewed it for more than 40  years and not knowing what was on it. There were unexpected glimpses of my late father and grandmother, as well as of my younger self, with that patina of time that heightens the strangeness of old film that has been lying around for decades. 

'Figurant' played with this resurrectionist aspect of old film footage. 'A séance for lost film. A tale of all that survives' that brings back to life its unspeaking minor characters glimpsed through a glass darkly. For a moment there I felt like I was actually present at a seance as the spoken word accompaniment echoed the language of spirt mediums.  Look out for more from the 'One Tree Hill Mystical Society'

The World to the Eel is a Net

'England was once a great marsh sloppy and empty of landlords. In this watery realm the serpent was sovereign'. So begins an imagined prophecy in Molly Lester's quilt based work 'The World to the Eel is a Net' by Molly Lester exhibited in the chapel of Nunhead Cemetery.

Free entry during cemetery opening hours until Sunday 8th September 2024.

 

Come Dine in Blue

'Come Dine in Blue'  at hARTslane Gallery in New Cross (next to Sainsburys) is a participatory art project created and produced by Tisna Westerhof & Cristiana Bottigella. As part of the Lewisham Borough of Culture, more than 100 participants of all ages, from 8 different Lewisham based community groups took part in 'a year-long art programme aiming to investigate and bring to light the diversity of cultural heritage in Lewisham, giving voice to five different communities of people who left their country to find new homes in the UK: the Asian and the Latin-American communities of New Cross; first and third generation African and Afro-Caribbean Lewisham residents and Middle Eastern refugees'.

The outcome is a 'Blue and White dining room installation telling stories of identity and belonging' centred around a dining room table with ceramics as well as tea towels and other works. It really is very moving with objects embodying people's memories and journeys.

'No one can take away the dances you've already had'

The exhibition continues until 6 October 2022. If you miss it try and get hold of the excellent book that accompanies it.

Spiderwall

A tough day, stumbled into something joyful in Peckham. 

Investigating further, I tried the door - well it said 'Open' - and found myself inside MOCA gallery on Bellenden Road, SE15.  The colourful floral/coral/what was it? sculpture had spread inside over the walls and ceilings - Spiderwall by Bologna artist Francesca Pasquali. On closer inspection it is made up of cobweb dusters - very Arte Povera use of everyday materials, but creating something otherworldy on a day when I wanted to be in another world.

Photos don't really do it justice, so check it out until 30 July. Child friendly too, you can touch as well as look. 

MOCA London is at 113 Bellenden Road, SE15 4QY. OpenThursday to Saturday, 2pm - 6pm

The Mighty Scheme - Graham Fagen

A couple of weeks ago (12 June) I went to a live performance by Ghetto Priest and Adrian Sherwood at Dilston Grove in Southwark Park.  The event was part of the 'The Mighty Scheme' exhibition by the Scottish artist Graham Fagen, taking place at Dilston Grove and at the nearby CGP gallery in the park.

I went back today to check out the exhibition in full. Its centrepiece is a four screen film and video installation 'The Slave's Lament', featuring Ghetto Priest singing Robert Burns' anti-slavery song of that name accompanied by strings. In the dark, cool space of the ex-church it is beautiful and mesmerising. 

The only other object in the church is a haunting rope tree, with its echoes of lynchings. Fagen is interested in the relationship between Caribbean history and Scottish identity. Burns, central to the latter, not only wrote about slavery but planned at one point to move to Jamaica. Ironically if he had succeeded it would probably have been to work on a slave plantation. He couldn't afford to make the trip, and then found success as a poet which made his escape from a precarious financial position in Scotland unnecessary.

Outside is one of Fagen's neon works 'Come into the Garden and forget about the war', while there is a series of connected work in the CGP gallery just across the grass. 

Tomorrow - Sunday 26th June - is your last chance to see this exhibition - both galleries are open from 11 am to 5 pm, admission free.

Natural Anarchy - Graham Fagen

Dora Project: Nazi terror in Germany & SE London

Last weekend coming up for the Dora Project at Peckham Platform (in Peckham Square by the library). A very interesting exhibition  that 'combines art, WW2 London and early rocket engineering' it has been put together by artist Françoise Dupré in collaboration with Rebecca Snow. Essentially it documents and displays the links between the Nazi V2 programme - which entailed slave labour in a concentration camp and the death of thousands in rocket attacks - and later US and Russian space exploration. In particular, after the second world war Nazi rocket engineers played a key role in the Apollo programme:

 

'DORA PROJECT connects two sites of terror: London and Mittelbau-Dora Nazi Concentration Camp in Central Germany. V2 rockets were assembled by slave labourers in an underground factory in Mittelbau-Dora where more than 20,000 inmates died. Between September 1944 and March 1945, V2 attacks on London killed around 2500 Londoners and destroyed homes and families'.

Mapping the connections between slave labour and rocket attacks



Wernher von Braun, architect of both the V2 rocket and the Apollo programme



 

Commemorating SE London victims - a list of V2 attacks in Lewisham
 

As this exhibition combines my local history interests and my previous time in the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, it couldn't have been more me. Dora Project closes on 15 May



Ben Smith - Cityscapes

CITYSCAPES is an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Ben Smith at Xavier White’s Gallery in Blackheath:

'Ben Smith draws and paints the urban fabric of South London, drawing from life and creating paintings in his studio, aiming to portray the depth, repetition and interchangeability of the contemporary cityscape.  The works exhibited at Xavier White’s front room gallery capture a city in flux, caught in the cross currents of redevelopment, displacement and demolition.

Ben trained at Central Saint Martins in the 1990s. He has exhibited in group shows in Brick Lane, Camberwell and Peckham. This is his first London solo show.




Elephant I - Ben Smith

Elephant II - Ben Smith





View of Southwark - Ben Smith



Cityscapes is at Xavier White’s Gallery, Top Flat, 26 Vanbrugh Park, Blackheath, London SE3 7AF. Until May 6th. To view the exhibition call Xavier 07 88 99 72 374

Christ Stopped at Burgess Park: Arild Rosenkrantz's war memorial

By Burgess Park in Wells Way SE5, in front of St George's Church (now flats), there stands a war memorial 'to the memory of those who served 1914-1918'. It features a bronze figure of Christ holding a crown of thorns. The statue, formally unveiled in 1920, was made by the Danish artist Arild Rosenkrantz (1870-1964), an interesting character who subscribed to a mystical strand of Christianity strongly influenced by Rudolf Steiner, who he first met in 1912 and worked with closely until Steiner's death in 1925. Not sure if there's any particular esoteric symbolism in the statue, but of course the crown of thorns is traditionally seen as being placed on Christ's head in the lead up to the crucifixion. Here Christ appears to be either contemplating the crown or offering it - to suffering humanity?

Much of the artist's work dealt with religious/spiritual themes, with his paintings also infused by Steiner's theories of the importance of colour (Steiner once said: 'Colours are the soul of nature and the entire cosmos – and we become part of that soul when we live with the colours').

Tempting to wonder if his c.1930 work, Temple of Peace, referenced St George's Church in Camberwell.

See also: Rudolf Steiner's visit to Deptford

Grayson Perry puts South London transgender man in the National Portrait Gallery

Grayson Perry has a new TV series on Channel 4, Who are You?, featuring him exploring identity through making portraits of people he meets. There is an accompanying exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, which opened this week and continues until March next year (admission free).

The first episode features an episode of transgender man Alex White from Bromley (interviewed in the Guardian here). At one point Alex returns with Grayson to Sedgehill School, the Catford school that he attended as a girl, and talks to students. Perry renders Alex as a statue 'I'm a Man', combining elements of Peter Pan and a Benin bronze.

photo from sammypie24

The Nunhead Fox

I like the wooden fox of Nunhead Green, placed there recently alongside the new children's play area. The sculpture is the work of artist/woodworkers Arthur de Mowbray, also responsible for the 'Camberwell Beauty' butterfly bench at Walworth Garden Farm.

Ruin Lust

A couple of weeks left at Tate Britain of 'Ruin Lust', the exhibition tracing artists' fascination with ruins from the 18th century onwards. London features heavily, with Transpontine content including:

Photographs by Henry Dixon of old inns facing demolition, commissioned  by the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London in the 1880s. This one is of King's Head Inn yard off Borough High Street SE1 in 1881. There is still a pub there of course, but the old 17th century coaching inn structure is no more:

The White Hart Inn in the same street was also photographed by Dixon in 1881, prior to being demolished in 1889:

Keith Coventry's Estate Paintings appear to be abstract designs but are in fact based on the layout of London estates. The exhibition features his 'Heygate Estate', painted in 1995 before the Estate became a famous ruin.

The exhibition also includes Coventry's bronze casts of vandalised saplings in Queens Road SE15 and 'Burgess Park SE5, Planted 1983, Destroyed 1988':

Laura Oldfield Ford's 'Ferrier Estate' (2010) pictures the now demolished estate in Kidbrooke. She sees ruins emerging as part of a class-based reshaping of London, and also wonders about the ruins of the future

'My psychogeographic drifts through different areas of London have become a melancholy project documenting the loss of certain aspects of the city . I return to places that have been important , sites of collective memory and desire that are being demolished. During the Blair years walking through the redeveloped and regenerated London streets was to experience alienation and familiarity simultaneously, fragments of memory would emerge as splinters in the smooth space of developers plans. Places that had been in the commons were being gated off, the consequence of a decade of corporate land grabs and sustained social cleansing. London was becoming an enclave for the wealthy, and the rest of us were being pushed out, scrubbed off the map and out of history... 

Many of the ruins we see emerging at an accelerated rate around London and the South east are the ruins of the future, the new build luxury highrises and inevitable victims of the next collapse in the property market. There are ranks of empty blocks, like Capital Towers in Stratford, bought off plan in auctions in Hong Kong and Malaysia and left as menacing totems of a speculative free for all. What will become of these places? Maybe they will end up as negative equity ghettos like the Pinnacles in Woolwich, sublet to recent arrivals from the former colonies and left in a state of chronic disrepair , or perhaps they will be seized and occupied by bands of rent defaulters, young people unable to afford anywhere to live in the South East whose desperation has led them to take militant direct action' (Laura Oldfield Ford, Zones of Sacrifice: 2010-2014)

'Ferrier Estate' by Laura Oldfield Ford

Ruin Lust at Tate Britain closes on 18th May

Telegraph Hill Festival 2014

Telegraph Hill Festival opens this weekend, with three weeks of art, music, theatre and more, including activities for everyone from toddlers to pensioners. You can read the full programme here, so I won't labour the point.

The biggest events, in terms of size, will probably be the community production of Annie Get Your Gun, Irving Berlin's musical (No Business like Show Business etc) with a cast of hundreds this weekend.

Then on Sunday 6th April, 1 pm to 6 pm there's SKAM II - Skate, Art & Music on Sundayl in Telegraph Hill Lower Park, Erlanger Road SE14: 'You are warmly invited to come and enjoy a Skate, Art and Music event in Telegraph Hill Lower Park.  There will be a bike powered roller disco!. So grab your blades and boards and bring the whole family. Other World Arts will be running a workshop turning rubbish into art - please bring along empty plastic bottles and packaging.  Skate comps, pop up shops and pro skater displays.  Pedal Power will be back so bring a bike to plug in - the more you pedal the more music to dance to!  A fun afternoon for all ages' (free).

This event will also feature Rum BQ & Sound System: 'Trinity Music London presents another RumBQ session powered by the Unit 137 Sound System.  RumBQ is a celebration of music, food and drink, with uplifting sound system music, barbecue food and rum cocktails.  Expect warm bass and smiling faces.  This is a family friendly event, where all ages are welcome.  Weather permitting, the event will be held outside in the park, together with SKAM II.  Or, if there is a threat of rain, the event will be in the Narthex' (next to St Catherine's Church).

Their event in the park last May was a lot of fun.

Sketching New Cross

Really enjoyed the 'Sketching New Cross' exhibition at Hart's Lane Studios SE14 last weekend. People from 'London Drawing on Location Group' came down to New Cross/Deptford last month and sketched what they saw, before exhibiting their work

Lots of local landmarks featured, including New Cross Inn, Marquis of Granby, St Pauls Church etc.

My personal favourites were Sue Harding's evocative drawings of cafe life, including this one from the London Particular in New Cross Road.

Tensions rise as Deptford secessionists launch petition

With the world's media focused on the crisis in Ukraine and the possibility of regions breaking away, a secessionist threat closer to home has so far gone largely unnoticed, except in the pages of the Newshopper and local blogs. Some settlers in the far East of Deptford are attempting to break up the integrity of the historic area by declaring that they do in fact live in Greenwich! They've even launched a petition to have their postcode changed from SE8 (Deptford) to SE10 (Greenwich). They say:

'The border between Deptford and Greenwich runs along Watergate street (crossing Creek Road). The border of the SE8/SE10 postcode runs along Deptford Creek. Citizens in this area are consistently effected by late / missing deliveries, higher insurance premiums etc. We all pay a higher rate of Council Tax to Greenwich, yet we are treated by the world as Deptford because of the power of the postcode. In addition to this our property prices are held at artificially low levels due to this confusion'.

This statue on the Peter the Great monument at Millennium Quay
was making its feelings clear today, wearing a 'Welcome to Deptford SE8' placard.

I must admit I thought with its reference to 'property prices' this was actually a satire on estate agents' hype, especially when I read the comment by somebody in the Newshopper that "Everything about the area is Greenwich, except the post code." I was going to write a long withering critique of this absurdity, but luckily 853 blog has saved me the time and done so there. The short version is that for historical reasons Deptford has been split for over a hundred years between being administered by two Councils - now Lewisham Council and Greenwich Council. The complainants presumably live in the Greenwich Council-adminstered side, but that no more means that they live 'in Greenwich' than people who live in Plumstead, Eltham or Woolwich - which are also within the so-called Royal Borough of Greenwich.

Deptford militia prepare to repel Greenwich incursion

The boundary between Greenwich and Deptford is Deptford Creek (the clue's in the name) and despite the efforts of estate agents to suggest otherwise, developments like Millennium Quay on the west side of the Creek are firmly in Deptford FULL STOP. That estate is actually on the site of the old Deptford Power Station, and other bits of Deptford in the Greenwich Council area include Deptford Green and the ancient parish church of St Nicholas Church, Deptford. I don't see them being renamed anytime soon. 

A far more obvious solution to avoid future confusion would be to redraw the borough boundaries so that Greenwich Council's area finishes at Deptford Creek. As 853 shows, this was what was originally proposed last time boundaries were reviewed in the 1990s. The reason it didn't go ahead was that Greenwich wanted all of Blackheath, so as a compromise Lewisham and Greenwich Councils split both Blackheath and Deptford between them - in both cases with little or no regard to the coherence of these areas.

Update Sunday 23 February: easy as it is to knock the people behind this ill-considered petition, the real villains are arguably developers Telford Homes who have been marketing their development on Copperas Street SE8 (next to the Laban) as 'Greenwich Creekside'. The website repeatedly refers to Greenwich rather than Deptford, saying for instance 'Greenwich is one of South London's most fascinating and vibrant districts. Our Greenwich properties lie just minutes from some of the city's most significant historical buildings - and you don't just have to take our word for that, as UNESCO has listed Maritime Greenwich as an official World Heritage Site due to the historical importance of the area'. It seems that the petition was started by people living there, rather than Millennium Quay. The same facts apply - whatever the developer might say this side of Deptford Creek is Deptford. Where does the Laban Centre think it is? Its website gives its address as 'Creekside, Deptford, SE8'. Correct.

Telford Homes website advertises Greenwich Creekside development - yes, its in the London Borough of Greenwich
but it is also very definitely in Deptford SE8

A little more on the Peter the Great statue...

I used to share the disdain some local people have for the  Peter the Great statue, but have changed my mind after reading an appreciation at Doilum blog and realizing that it is supposed to be subversively absurd:

'into this came Mihail Chemiakin, a Russian sculptor relatively unknown inside the UK, to jolly up this vapid development with a statue of Peter the Great. Peter the Great lived by the dockyard for four months as a young man in the seventeenth century at the home of the writer John Evelyn, where he studied shipbuilding and other new technologies coming out of England at the time.

The resulting work, unveiled in 2001, is a bizarre and ugly piece of art. There are three separate pieces on the municipal plinth: an empty throne to the right, a fat, squat dwarf to the left, and in the centre Peter the Great himself, his booming chest comical in juxtaposition to a tiny, disproportioned head. This sculpture does not flatter its subject matter - it holds it in contempt.

Chemiakin was a dissident artist in Soviet Russia and was exiled to the United States in 1971. Upon Russia's return to artisitic freedom Chemiakin went back to his homeland, and apparently his comical, disrespectful effigies of public figures are everywhere. He expresses a very Russian attitude to authority that sneers at, debases and takes the piss out of those that have repeatedly driven his country to despair. There is no measured critique in the Deptford statue of Peter the Great; instead an off-hand disdain that makes a laughing stock of its subject. Its main point that the everyday passer-by feels superior to the silly figures that stand above them. It is informed by a Russian sense of humour that celebrates the collective, downtrodden self against authority'.