Congregation Digital Magazine by Milly Brown

Congregation

Issue One

Dinner, Ladies by Janey F Schmidt. Photography by Megan Hemsworth

Contents

Editors Letter.............................................Page 5 N-E-W Testaments.....................................Page 6 Matter Matters by Micael Corsar...............Page 12 The Congregation.....................................Page 16 Remerge by Tilly Craig.............................Page 18

Congregation Issue One: Ashburton Methodist Chapel

Editor & Creative Director Milly Brown

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Art Adviser Mark Jessett

Writers Milly Brown Michael Corsar Tilly Craig

Photography Megan Hemsworth Artists Dave Beech Milly Brown Jane Cabrera Stephen Felmingham Mark Jessett Robert Manners Alex Murdin Karen Pearson Janey F Schmidt Andrew Stacey Proofreaders Alanna Morgan Johny Smeaton Praise be Ashburton Arts N-E-W.org

Printer Reproart, Fine Art Printer and Finisher UK Typefaces STIXGeneral Didot Paper from G.F Smith Transclear in Natural Colourplan in Powder Green Mohawk Superfine in Eggshell Congregation: 1 Published September 2018 Copyright ÂŠ 2018 Congregation All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any without the prior permission of the publisher. Views expressed are those of the retrospective contributors and not necessarily shared by Congregation.

Hello reader, art lover, collector. In the village where I was born we had a Moravian chapel. This chapel, and the adjoining schoolhouse, was used by the whole village, not just devout Moravians; it was a useful and loved ‘community space’. It had the appearance that so many of these buildings have in common; layers of decoration and repair performed by the well-meaning volunteer rather than the expert tradesman, an ensemble of different furnishings and objects of varying vintages and levels of usefulness, windows painted shut, doors left ajar. It was this recognisable situation that I found on entering the Methodist Chapel in Ashburton. Many miles away from where I grew up, but still the familiar dusty smell, the motes moving through the light and the visible patina of a space used and cared for over time. So many hands, so many stories, so much investment, all of this tangible in the smoothing of the handrails, the wearing of the carpet and the overlaying (and overlaying) of pipes and wires.

Editor’s Letter

Invited by contemporary art group N-E-W, and with the blessing of Ashburton Arts, who now own the building, I was here to make art in, and for, the space. Neither entirely private nor municipal, the foggy edges of ownership allowed us to encroach on the space, to claim some aspect of it. Taking responsibility for the proper treatment and interpretation of the chapel, the more one committed, the more control was earned. Congregation wants to tell you about Ashburton’s Methodist Chapel, its stories and its communities, because perhaps you know somewhere like it, or perhaps because you don’t. All of the artists and writers who have contributed to this issue want to share with you its uniqueness, and ask if it has something in common with the places you know? In this, the first issue of Congregation, you will find 10 signed Artists’ Editions, all produced in limited runs of 100, all inspired by site-specific interventions that the artists made in and around the chapel. All the editions are removable; tangible prints and artefacts that you can unpack and display. Bring your own vision. Curate your own exhibition. This inaugural issue also features photographer Megan Hemsworth’s evocative images of the artists’ installations in the Chapel, as well as essays by multidisciplinary designer and interior architect Michael Corsar, and writer, researcher and creative producer, Tilly Craig.

Symposium by Stephen Felmingham. Photography by Megan Hemsworth

Testaments In 2018 N-E-W, an organisation that provides open platforms for contemporary art practitioners in the South West, invited a group of local artists to create site-specific work for Ashburton Methodist Chapel. “As a contemporary arts collective we want to draw attention to the depth of creative talent in our community- that’s what we do.” Robert Manners, curator of N-E-W...ideas 2018. The Methodist Chapel, built in 1835, had recently been acquired by the group Ashburton Arts for use as a community arts space. Prior to that it had served the small South Devon town as a place of worship and meeting. The resulting exhibition, ‘N-E-W…ideas 2018’, funded by Arts Council England, aimed to provoke questions about how the space could be used by visual artists as an exhibition or workspace and how this could benefit the communities of Ashburton and the South West.

Dinner, Ladies by Janey F Schmidt. Photography by Megan Hemsworth

New Religions by Robert Manners. Photography by Megan Hemsworth

Photo-text Print by Dave Beech. Photography by Megan Hemsworth

Offering by Mark Jessett. Photography by Megan Hemsworth

Wondering and Wandering by Milly Brown. Photography by Megan Hemsworth

Continuum by Karen Pearson. Photography by Megan Hemsworth

Matters by Michael Corsar

Art, Context and an architecture of presence: Matter matters Context (kon’ tekst) [L. contextus, p.p. of con-texere (CON-, texere, to weave], n. the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood; a weaving together; the disposition and relation to the parts of a compound body, composition or structure.

of the Weimar Republic addressing the conditions of settlement and inhabitation, architects have always found it difficult to remain on the narrow path of determinism.” At the beginning of the 21st century, with late capitalism finally coming under sustained attack through the disastrous, greed-fuelled global financial crisis, the ideology and need for newness and novelty is finally and nakedly exposed and is transparently associated with the workings of the market, the requirement for perpetual growth and unsustainable exponential expansion. Caruso again: “Now more than ever, it is the cultural that lends architecture continued relevance. It is architecture’s capacity to be reflexive and critical that sets it apart from advertising, on the one hand, and pure science on the other.” Therefore, architecture can provide a critical defense. There is no compelling reasoning as to why architecture should reject 400 years of working within a liberal arts context. As art practice has done, architecture can put forward restorative strategies that might suggest what could come after the global market and can remind us of the things that are excluded within the current civic model. Architecture does — and should have — a social dimension. And architecture is by definition about stasis. It is about making material interventions of a finite size in specific situations. In the best cases an architectural intervention has a critical relationship with its situation and is somehow communicative with its physical and social context. Within the public realm, it is the physical territory of collective action. In the same way as in art and literature but in a less easily ignored way, architecture contributes to our collective memory. Because of the impossibility of a tabula rasa condition, constructions must necessarily respond to and engage with the reality of their situation — whether they want to or not. In the face of constant demand for newness and novelty, claims for completely original forms are pleonastic. The imperative to make forms that have no connection to the past, an omen of an augmented future, is anti-critical and conservative. The condition of perpetual novelty within a void-like tabula rasa, undermines cultural continuity and denies the location of collective action.

Common ground and the importance of place: Context From the designers perspective, the immediate reaction upon reflecting on the notion of site-specific art (in this case, the Methodist Chapel in Ashburton), is to consider the linkages between art, architecture, locality and community, and to identify the overlaps and commonalities that synthesize these disparate interests. In both the case of the site-specific artist and the architect, context provides clues in the search for meaning and expression, as well as a link to the locality and its inhabitants. It is in this territory, the primacy of context as the generative seed, we could consider the nature and the role of context and the infinite richness and ambiguity of concrete reality, in both the architectural project and the site-specific art installation. Through an architectural lens of continuity, place, presence and the reality of everyday life, we can find common ground in the artistic production of work and (relatively) recent and on-going shifts in architectural thinking that draw the practice of both disciplines closer together in a search for meaning, expression and experience from the stuff of actual reality. Cultural continuity, perpetual novelty and the impossibility of the tabula rasa condition After successive internal crises suffered by the architectural profession, firstly, with the rupture and eventual severing of continuity through modernist zealotry and then the slow, almost imperceptible crumbling of the modernist canon itself in the face of growing urgency for a kind of historical coherence or re-establishing of continuity, resulting in a re-evaluation of classicism through visual language and codification (so called Post-modernism) and finally a partial take-over of the profession at the service of the economic hegemony, the role and meaning of context has shifted erratically and dramatically over the past 100 years. Since the birth of modernism, successive architects and critics have lamented the retardation of their discipline in comparison to industrially produced objects. However, even in the 1920s and 30s at the height of revolutionary modernist zeal, architects were still confronted by the cultural foundation of their exertion. London based architect Adam Caruso of Caruso St. John noted: “Whether it was Le Corbusier formulating his five points as a critique of the classical canon, or the architects

Architecture and rejection of the Southern Utopia During the febrile discussions of the 1980s and early 1990s around the topic of architecture after modernism, a group of mostly northern European and in particular Swiss architects, questioned the long accepted certainties that had arisen from the purist promise of modernism, as revealed in Le Corbusier’s famous dictum that “Architecture is the magnificent interplay of volumes assembled under light”. Some began to question, what happens if architecture is not an interplay of anything at all, and what if the light is frequently hidden behind the clouds, diffuse and not radiant as in the ideal southern landscape?

Architecture and matter as a Technical-Poetic Experience With the rejection of the southern utopia which, for Le Corbusier, embedded modern architecture in a platonic classicism, increasing numbers of architects aimed to return to the harsh reality of everyday life. The aim, from the point of view of architecture, was to achieve an architecture of presence by denying representation. How can we create an architecture whose architectural presence arises not from representation (as occurred in certain post modern currents with their focus on language, codification and a re-working of the classical) but something that is beyond the image? The design strategies to help solve these questions vary from constructing the project through material aggregates, or others that involve rooting the design in tradition, understood as the correspondence between language and technique. Adam Caruso again: “The world around us can be described in terms of conventions and in terms of physical phenomena. Typologies can provide familiar images that can provoke certain collective emotional responses of the ‘known’. More topological, material assemblies and aggregations make a kind of atmosphere that elicit an almost physiological reaction”. Most things can be described in both these ways and design process necessarily vacillates, uncertainly and waveringly between the two, searching for meaning in any given situation. Topoanalysis Therefore architecture should not be cultivated by the external images of a utopian, idealistic radiant Mediterranean modernism, but by the inner memories of childhood that people carry within themselves, memories of the direct relationship that one once had with daily space and objects. To access a kind of architecture that includes the emotional reality of memories requires reference to topoanalysis as means of accessing and developing an architecture of experiences and a consideration of the fact that memories of how a space is used are not simply retinal in nature but haptic, sensorial and tactile. As celebrated Swiss architect Peter Zumthor stated: “There was a time in my life when I experienced architecture without thinking about it. I remember the feel of the door handle in my hand when I entered my aunt’s garden. That piece of metal, shaped like the back of a spoon, was like a welcome sign in a world made up of various sounds and smells — walking on the gravel, climbing the polished wooden steps, hearing the heavy mass of the front door banging shut behind me, leaving the dark hall and entering the kitchen, the only well-lit room in the house.” So some of the questions raised in architectural discourse can be summed up in the idea that architecture should translate or enable an emotional experience. This involves

the stillness of technique, the study of material aggregates and the distillation, simplification and reduction of forms. The architect’s recourse to artistic production, particularly to artists such as Joseph Beuys or Mario Mertz, is not a strategy of sign incorporation; on the contrary, it is a way of emptying the work of representation, by valuing presence, experiencing the works materiality and through it, constructing new memories. Again, Peter Zumthor: “there is something revelatory in the work of artists like Joseph Beuys and the arte-povera group of artists, such as Mario Mertz. It is their precise and sensual use of materials. It seems to turn towards an old cultural idea of what materials are, while at the same time retrieving the very nature of the materials themselves, now freed from any cultural significance. [...] It is the work of art that makes us see the significance of materials in a completely new way.” Matter matters. And this emotional architecture of presence, rooted in the reality of the everyday experience and memory, through carefully selected or curated material assemblages, returns us to the common ground of context as generator and engages in the concrete reality of the here and now. In a search for common ground for artists, architects and communities through a contextual reading, in its broadest sense, we find that the richest seam might be that which considers and represents the existing and the known. In this way, artistic production can critically engage with an existing situation and can contribute to an ongoing and progressive cultural discourse. When engaging directly with the ineludible present, with the visceral reality of the everyday, matter matters.

Michael Corsar Michael began his art and design studies at Portsmouth college of Art, and later completing an MA in Industrial Design at the Royal College of Art in London, in 1994. He has worked internationally at offices in California, as well as Studio De Lucchi in Milan, Italy, Pentagram in London and Wolff Olins in London and New York, prior to opening his own practice in London in 2008. Michael was on the founding committee and visiting professor in the Design Department at the University of Bolzano in Italy from 2002 — 2006. He continues to work as a multidisciplinary designer across the fields of product and packaging design, furniture and retail systems, through interiors and architecture, designing across scales and sectors. As well as caring deeply about the pragmatic issues associated with manufacture, production and construction, he is also convinced that design is necessarily strategic and conceptual and is in large part a cultural as well as commercial activity.

The Fifth Plinth by Alex Murdin. Photography by Megan Hemsworth

The very first Congregation of artists are:

Dave Beech

Milly Brown

Jane Cabrera

Stephen Felmingham

Mark Jessett

Robert Manners

Alex Murdin

Karen Pearson

Janey F Schmidt

Andrew Stacey 17

Remerge by Tilly Craig

Prayer by Jane Caberera. Photography by Megan Hemsworth

Cherry Chalk, Priscilla Small and Mabel Merrett are three women who each spent time in Ashburton. For CONGREGATION I have revived a moment in their memory, imagining their impressions of the area’s landscape and folklore. Cherry Chalk, June 1790 When the summer is close like this, I forget to breathe. The crickets are so loud I can hardly think, my head is filled with flat hums and that high tinny buzz. The moon is still high and bright. It glances off the river like daggers and illuminates my room. When the last candle dimmed in the village, and darkness became dense, I followed the water out to the bridge again. Neither a child nor a drunk, Cutty Dyer has no interest in me.

Mabel Merrett, October 1915 How strange it is here. So much like what I know and so far from that too. I keep dreaming of the great, still lake. Here, there is a river, a tiny thing but hurtling – dark and heavy with mysteries. There is a bridge no one dares cross at night. After he returned from school yesterday, William told me in a very sober tone about a beast who lives in the shadows beneath it, waiting to feast on young blood. His imagination has only grown hungrier in England, where the veneer of gentility so easily slips to expose this country’s ancient savagery, and war is at our doorstep. From my window, a quilt of fields rolls skyward. It is cut by hedgerows and jagged boughs, so I begin to embroider my hopes and fears.

Bracken had begun to creep into the clearing beyond the bridge since I last visited. The stark moonlight illuminated a canopy of webs clinging to branches above. At the circle’s centre I closed my eyes, curling my toes into the dank carpet of moss and chamomile, and exhaled. Cherry Chalk is referred to within a letter by Richard Carlile of Ashburton published in The Republican, dated 1825: “My first schoolmistress was old ‘Cherry Chalk’, who taught me the alphabet on a horn book, and performed all sorts of cures without medicine by the potent power of charms…”

Mabel Merrett journeyed from Toronto to Ashburton in 1915, where she remained for 14 years. She re-emigrated to Canada with her family in 1929. Tilly Craig is a writer, researcher and creative producer based in Devon. She explores themes of the occult and identity through writing and visual projects, including documentary film. Past research has examined gender and the occult through contemporary media and online. Tilly also contributes to Black Mirror research network and was a coordinator of Seeking the Marvellous, a 2018 interdisciplinary symposium examining the work of Ithell Colquhoun and other women connected with Surrealism and occultism in Britain.

Priscilla Small, February 1902 We’ve stopped by a rowan along the Ashburn tonight. It’s bitter cold and a fuzz of rain pinches down the nape of my neck, but there’s a pub close by. We leave the children sleeping, and walk with flasks toward the village lights. Amongst the plume-like ferns, I half-notice tufts of angelica growing clumped along the bank. Or maybe water hemlock. Protection or poison.

tillyalicecraig@gmail.com Instagram: @tillyalice

Opening the door, hops and ash envelop me in warmth, and slumped figures line the bar. A girl with red cheeks and bored eyes traces spirals on the wood with her fingertip. Noah orders beer and I feel the familiar thrill as eyes narrow and backs stiffen in our presence. Priscilla Small was charged with telling fortunes, amongst other crimes, in 1902. She died on 16th January 1910 in Ashburton. 19

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