24th June – 3rd September 2016
This review is really about Trophies, a stunning new exhibition in the city, but it is also partly about the gallery that hosts it, so let me start there first. Tucked down a tiny passage off Bedford Street, called Websdales Court, the gallery has in fact been there for many years, when it was run, as many will remember, by the legendary Timothy ‘Tizzie’ Fairhurst. The gallery was started in 1949 by his father, Joseph Fairhurst, a painter and member of the Norwich Twenty Group. It was his Flint House Gallery, back then in Elm Hill, that hosted the very first meeting of the Norfolk Contemporary Art Society just over 60 years ago. More recently, in Bedford Street, the Fiarhurst Gallery has passed to a wonderful and dynamic young couple Dulcie and Tom Humphrey, who together with their outstandingly capable framer, Sophie Barrett, now run a specialist framing and restoration service upstairs, in a vast heaven of glorious and seductive ‘stuff’ that one would yearn to work in, as well as a dynamic and adventurous contemporary gallery downstairs, overseen by Dulcie. This is just the sort of initiative that Norwich, already edging towards city of art status, deserves. Recent exhibitions have been intelligently curated and brilliantly hung and promoted, and have included a sensible blend of local artists (Brüer Tidman, Joceline Wickham and Polly Cruse, Malca Schotten, Greg Barnes) as well as some from outside the County, a very healthy sign.
Upstairs at Fairhurst
Which brings me to James Webster. I may be getting long in the tooth, but I have just looked carefully at all the work in the British Art Show 8 that is all over Norwich at the moment, and I have to say that I find Webster’s work more interesting and more engaging than that of any of the 40+ young artists chosen to represent the best in Britain. How odd is that? Well, not very, actually, as even a brief visit to this current exhibition will confirm. Webster grew up in Norfolk, went to school in Norwich, and now works in Suffolk. But he trained in Florence and this has given him a breadth of experience in history, ceramics and anatomy that permeates his work here. Trophies has deep roots in childhood obsessions with bones and slaughter houses. Working from real skulls, this has emerged as a series of eight animal skulls and their vertebrae first made in terracotta 20% larger than life-size. Horse, tiger, stork and rhino. Dissected into parts, moulds are made and then casts produced in porcelain, which are assembled and fired. Now back to life-size, parts like teeth are glazed and colour is supplied with iron oxides before the final firing. Gold leaf is then applied to the areas that would be lit by a strong overhead light. Finally these remarkable structures are intuitively balanced or mounted just so on their gorgeously-patinated, custom-made concrete plinths, each in turn standing on a perfectly-proportioned, dark mild-steel base. The skull ensemble is arranged dramatically spotlit as an avenue, four on each side, in the black curtained gallery, now entered by a black arch.
This powerful juxtaposition of what look like at first like real bones, or indeed ancient fossils, with gold leaf, and their formal presentation in a dark chapel or tomb-like setting, conjure up many thoughts and resonances. Guardians or Icons or Memorials? The sun-like gold on ancient Egyptian tomb figures, hints at rituals of the dead, funerary rites and our veneration for lost beings. So are these skulls of animals or of gods, clearly revered here on their spotlit plinths? The delicate bone-like porcelain, that is also so strong as a material, hints at the strength of our commonality with the animal kingdom, from which we evolved so relatively recently. This complex, unified display of work gives us pause for thought; about who we are, how we came to be, what we value in life and in death, and that is what art should do. So, congratulations to James Webster, his agent Jonathan Kugel and to Fairhurst for so brilliantly housing it all!
