The Jerwood Makers Open has been running since 2010. It seeks to encourage the importance of making and materials and to support outstanding skill and imagination. The judges selected this year’s five finalists from over three hundred applicants. The exhibition highlights woodworking, weaving, ceramics and metalwork; each artist working on ideas central to their own individual practice, distinct and different from the others. But to me the current exhibition shares an overarching theme that draws them together; the works in the exhibition all tap into a mythical Britain.
Illumination from the Rochefoucauld Grail Manuscript photo: Sotheby’s/PA Wire
The 12th century monk and scholar, Geoffrey of Monmouth, drew on Greek Mythology, folklore, Celtic legends and Arthurian Romance to create a mash-up fictional history called the Historia Regum Britanniae, also known as The Matter of Britain; myths that underlie the very fabric of the country, describing a place of forests, giants, legendary kings and prophecy. More than that, Monmouth created a literary landscape that shaped and influenced many others; Thomas Malory, Edmund Spencer, Shakespeare, and J. R. R. Tolkien amongst them. Even William Blake’s prophetic books of a mythological Britain, with their own gods and giants, drew on Monmouth.
After the last Ice Age, 7000 years ago, vast woodland covered Britain. In mediaeval times, they said that a squirrel could cross Britain without once touching the ground.
Mystical Fairy Walkpath in Forest. Photo by Erik Tanghe, via www.goodfreephotos.com
This ancient wildwood is woven through Monmouth’s mythology and the mediaeval romances. They were otherworldly places of mystery, madness, peril and power; the seat of an untamed Nature. It also gave rise to much folklore; from the dwelling places of Anglo-Saxon local gods and spirits, to tales of Faerie, Robin Hood, and Merlin as a Wild Man of the Wood.
The Celtic tradition saw forests and trees as sacred, watched over by Oak Seers or Druids. Stories of the Anglo Saxon wudewose, or Green Man, a guardian of Nature, are still with us today.
Over the centuries, people cleared vast swathes of woodland for agriculture or timber. Today Britain’s forests are patchy and only cover 13% of the land. Only 2% of this are remnants of the ancient woodland.
Making All the Greens Unstable (2019) by Bethan Lloyd Worthington
Bethan Lloyd Worthington’s work explores the ambiguity of Nature and the idea that, although Nature has a magnificent beauty, there is something dark there we do not want to disturb. Her ceramic piece Making All the Greens Unstable (2019) hints at Man’s precarious relationship with Nature. Its references, from the Iron Age Nebra sky disc, a kind of astronomical calendar used for agriculture, to the felling of the Sheffield street trees in 2016, recall the original clearing of the ancient woodland. We are upsetting our balance with Nature. The two impassive masks are reminiscent of the Green Man from mediaeval imagery. Are they judging our actions?
(l) Kindled Land Jar (2019) (c) Cracked Land Jar (2019) (r) Riven Land Jar (2019) by Forest + Found
Echoes of this imbalance are in the work of Forest and Found, too. The turned wooden pots and jars look like archaeological finds of ritual vessels, scarred and burned as if through some attempted alchemy. They bear names such as Kindled Land Jar (2019), Cracked Land Jar (2019) and Riven Land Jar (2019), titles that wouldn’t be out of place on the cover of an epic fantasy novel.
The Wounded Land (1980) (c) Ballantine Books
Their very names reflect the Fisher King myths of Arthurian Romance, with the ill and wasting king in a symbiotic relationship with a wounded and broken land that needs the Grail to restore both to health and wellbeing.
Revenant III (2019) by Forest + Found
The pitch-dyed, quilted tapestries Revenant I, II and III (2019) are an artistic act of dendromancy, or tree divination, like the rings through a felled tree trunk, depicting the history of the tree and the land. They speak of the few remnants of the ancient wildwood that still exist today. The word ‘revenant’ is also an Anglo-Saxon term for ghosts, or the undead, literally ‘the returned’. Forest + Found created the pitch dye from the Cedar of Lebanon tree. In the Middle Ages there was a prophecy called the Cedar of Lebanon Vision. It achieved popularity during the Black Death, prophesying famines, catastrophes and death, before a period of peace, and the appearance of the Antichrist heralding the end of the world (still lots for 2020 to get its teeth into there).
Through a Glass Darkly (2019) by Tana West photo: Anna Arca
Tana West’s walk-through installation, Through a Glass Darkly (2019), also has an element of divination about it. It invites us into a rigid man-made structure that throws back twisted and misshapen images of ourselves.
West came across shiny black artefacts that inspired her while looking for the remains of a Neolithic forest (that would have been part of the ancient wildwood) on the banks of the Thames. Their surfaces resembled Claude Glass, a reflective black surface made from obsidian, or volcanic glass, and used by artists to help simplify tonal values when painting.
Dr John Dee, the Elizabethan astrologer and mathematician, used Monmouth’s history as political propaganda to create the idea of a ‘British Empire’. He is also written into British myth himself as an occultist and sorcerer. He reputedly used a similar black obsidian mirror as a scrying glass, an alternative crystal ball. This was a ritual object, through which he allegedly consorted with angels, spirits and sought prophetic visions.
Dr. Dee’s Magical Mirror © Trustees of the British Museum
West’s sculpture encourages us to engage with the warped reflections and to explore these obscured, distorted visions of reality before us - as if through a scrying glass.
Lucie Gledhill’s Chain (2019) is a sculpture created from wood, iron, and silver links laid out in a row to resemble a fallen tree, and also suggest the formation of a chain. But for me it hints at the way we are linked to Nature, too.
Here, again, is a connection to Arthurian myth and the Fisher King. It is a subtext explored visually in the 1981 film Excalibur by John Boorman. Merlin represents our primal and instinctive relationship with Nature; the wood. The Pre-Arthurian knights of Uther Pendragon, armoured in brutish iron, represent a disconnection from Nature, and Arthur and his enlightened knights clad in silver, are Grail knights, seeking a more spiritual re-connection with Nature to heal a wounded and riven land.
Excalibur (1981) (c) Warner Bros. Pictures
The Arthurian myth is a parable of the cycle of birth, life, death and renewal. A fallen tree represents much the same thing. Far from being the end of life, a decaying tree in a forest provides habitats for fresh life, from fungi to beetles, that break down the wood to provide nutrients that help continue the cycle of the woodland.
(l) Chain (2019) by Lucy Gledhill (r) green forest cc
Forest folklore runs through Britain like warp threads through the weft of the past, interweaving with the world to create a rich tapestry of history and myth. Which brings us to Mark Corfield-Moore’s work.
Vuurwerk in Covent Garden, (1690), Bernard Lens (II) © Rijksmuseum
Inspired by 17th century prints of firework displays, his work captures the brief, shining moment of exploding fireworks, their existence blinding and magnificent but extinguished all too soon, and explores their relationship to time and memory.
The individual works take their titles from a poem to Francis Malthus, an English gunner and engineer in the French army in the 1620s. He was also the author of a book called A Treatise of Artificial Fireworks, both for Warres and Recreation (1629) in which the poem appears;
Thy Archimedean hand hath learnt to frame
Celestial meteors out of Nitrous Flames
And represents strange fires of different sorts
Suited to martial vice and Courtly sports;
So pleasing that great kings have spare’d some hours
To be spectators of thy golden showers.
(l) Celestial Meteors (2019) (c) Nitrous Flames (2019) (r) Golden Showers (2019) by Mark Corfield-Moore
In terms of the mythical British landscape, there are elements of almost Blakean prophecy to these weavings. They might reference William Blake’s America (1793) and maybe even The Blazing World (1666) by Mary Cavendish and its otherworldly firestones.
Given our current disconnection from Nature and recent warnings from scientists that our window for reversing climate change is rapidly dwindling, these works from Corfield–Moore capture something of man’s unstable relationship to Nature. A warning, perhaps. Measured against Nature itself, our existence is as fleeting as a firework. Nature doesn’t care if we’re here or not. It will carry on regardless.
Weaving all these threads together brings us back to the Matter of Britain. For me, the Jerwood Open 2019 draws on myth, folklore and history to warn us that our place here isn’t as certain as we think it is. We only have to look at the city spaces that have been ‘abandoned’ during the COVID lockdown to see how quickly Nature rushes in to fill the void. We have little time to regain our balance with Nature and heal a wounded land or else King Arthur’s last lines of the finale in Camelot may well be our epitaph, too;
“Don't let it be forgot
That once there was a spot,
For one brief shining moment,
that was known as Camelot.”
Camelot (1967) © Warner Bros
At least, that’s what I observe looking into the scrying glass of the Jerwood Open.
What do you see?