Beatrice Haines Peace Comes from Small Things
Old City Residency Exhibition www.centrespacegallery.com
Old City Residency & Exhibition August - September 2015 In 2015 Artist Beatrice Haines was selected from an open call for proposals to be the gallery’s first artist in residence. Using the gallery as a temporary exhibition space during August her brief was to be a visual response to the area around the gallery known as The Old City, considering the multi layered historical, commercial and social aspects of the old city streets from a contemporary perspective. Following the residency Beatrice presented her work to the public in an exhibition entitled: ‘Peace Comes From Small Things’
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Peace Comes from Small Things There are elements of our environment which are rendered almost invisible by their very ubiquity. This is particularly true in the city where our attention is competed for by an overabundance of stimuli. In the rush of daily city life small things habitually go unnoticed and unseen. During a month-long residency in Bristol’s Old City Beatrice Haines has spent time noticing the unnoticed. In the culminating exhibition, Peace Comes from Small Things (2015), these unassuming elements are quietly brought to our attention through a series of subtle interventions and transformative repetitions. As the Old City was once enclosed by a wall Haines has enclosed the space of the exhibition with butted sections of low, metallic-grey, ridged bars. The bars seem vaguely familiar though not immediately identifiable. They are, it transpires, casts of the iron kerbs which edge the Old City’s walkways, designed to protect the stones from carriage wheels. Haines’ interpretation of the kerb is symbolically protective; demarcating a safe space of contemplation and stillness in the midst of the frantic city. Ideas and modes of protection recur throughout the work. The need for protection simultaneously suggests the possibility of threat. The delicate and reciprocal balance between the two is articulated by Haines’ drawn reworking of an Old City map. The drawing reduces the buildings and features of the city to their most rudimentary protective elements: the roofs. The notion of protection is undermined by the knowledge that the
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4,500 roofs in the drawing approximately correspond to the number of deaths caused by the bubonic plague in medieval Bristol – a threat the solidity of the city’s wall was unable to resist. The drawing is graphically clean and ordered – clinical even - yet at the same time elicits a sense of a chaotic swarm; an unpredictable infestation; a plague. The city is, by definition, a cultural phenomenon and, occasionally, the cultural needs to protect itself from the natural. Haines has made a series of works from pigeon spikes – another ubiquitous and mundane element of the city landscape. In Haines’ hands the utilitarian nature of the spikes are superseded by their aesthetic and affective possibilities. In one piece Haines manipulates the spikes to create a layered sculpture which resembles a fragile architectural model; signifying the very object the spikes are designed to protect. The sculpture also, however, invokes scientific and natural forms – perhaps a biological lab model or a smack of petrified jellyfish. In another work the upturned spikes form irregular hoops on the floor of the gallery suggesting the microscopic structure of living cells – their protective membranes once again echoing the embrace of the city wall. By recontextualizing the inanimate and overlooked Haines emphasizes the living breathing humanity of the city. Linda Taylor 2015
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Image Catalogue Cover ‘Black Bristol’ Drawing
Page 13 Illuminated crucifix
Page 02 Moulding
Page 14 ‘Nest’ - Plastic pigeon spikes
Page 05 Beatrice with ‘Stained Static’ & detail Page 06 St John’s Church Crypt Pages 07 & 08 The Exhibition Pages 09 & 10 ‘A Sharp Rise in Interest’ - Plaster casts of pigeon spikes Pages 11 & 12 ‘Blitz to Basin’ - Casts of shrapnel damage, St Nicholas Church
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Pages 15 - 20 Original letterpress prints of graffiti found in old city toilets Page 21 ‘Black Bristol’- Drawing Page 22 ‘Black Bristol’ - Detail
Centrespace Gallery would like to thank: Arts Council England who made the project possible by awarding us a Grant Mark Devereux Projects - Manchester, for consultancy support and advice Bristol Fine Art - Park Street, Bristol Our gallery volunteers for their time and enthusiasm
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Centrespace Gallery 6 Leonard Lane Bristol BS1 1EA www.centrespacegallery.com