Another season, another lockdown. With Covid-restrictions tightened again in London today, memories of those strange, otherworldly months in Spring come flooding back. I find myself thinking of the luminous painting that 82-year old artist David Hockney shared with the world in March, of sunshine-yellow daffodils holding up firmly against a background of bright green grass and a turquoise sky. “Do Remember They Can’t Cancel the Spring’, was its title, a message of light in dark times.
The daffodils have long gone; on my walks in Hampstead Heath I am threading conkers and acorns and damp Autumn leaves. But this is the thing with nature: it cannot be canceled. It will keep on going, growing and reproducing, promising a future.
The refuge to nature is visible in the art world, too, and three artworks shown in London this month have particularly grabbed me. First of all, Helen Cammock’s film They call it Idlewild, a beautiful meditation around the theme of idleness shown at Kate MacGarry. Cammock made the film during a residency at Wysing Art Centre, Cambridge in January this year when word of a quickly spreading virus had just emerged from China. Whether it was an artist’s sensibility to what was to come or an unexpected twist added to the work later, Cammock’s film is an unbelievably timely piece that manages to convey at once the strangeness and the mundanity of the past six months.
Helen Cammock, They Call it Idlewild, 2020 (still)
Helen Cammock, They Call it Idlewind, 2020 (still)
The camera moves from a quiet country lane outside Wysing art centre, where cars glide by as if in trance, to the garden. It lingers for a moment on drops of rain on leaves, a brick wall, a quiet park bench then takes us inside into Cammock’s studio. It captures an arrangement of clay pots laid-out on dew-covered window panes, lit by a weak Winter sun. ‘The light shaft of nothingness’, says a woman’s voice (the artist’s). Our gaze is directed to a dead fly on a table. ‘Fly lies in light, a beautiful corpse, leg flicks’. A hint to vanitas paintings, maybe, but in Cammock’s world, even death is clouded in softness.
The film takes on a sharper edge when Cammock starts singing Johnny Mercer’s Depression Era song ‘Lazybones’ in a slow, melancholic tone. The song, sang to Cammock by her father when she was a child, was traditionally used to mock black slaves in America. ‘It is ironical’, Hammock’s voice continues, ‘that those who work the hardest are often seen as lazy, whilst the lazy slave owner is considered the hardworking businessman to which all material assets accrue.’ Cammock makes clear that idleness and laziness are two different things, but that only those who are fortunate enough to be able to do nothing have access to both.
William Mackrell’s work Rage rage against the dying of the light was also started before the pandemic and finished in the studio in the months of lockdown. During a residency with Launchpad in Charante last September, British artist William Mackrell, like many people visiting the region, was impressed by the beauty of the sunflowers in the blazing sun. But more so, he was struck by what happened after they had faded, when rows and rows of sunflowers were clipped by machines and left in the fields.
Photo of the sunflower fields in Charante by William Mackrell
“The farmers were mowing down the fields, leaving a battlefield of stumps behind them”, Mackrell told me. “It was this clash between their beauty and the sinister presence of impending death that struck me. I had this sense of them in my studio at night wandering around, looking for their group in the field. I started to play out this story of the sunflowers as a group of insomniacs’’.
Mackrell took the broken-off sunflowers to his studio and started a process of camera-less photography, leaving the sunflower-stalks, heads, and seeds on black photographic paper which he placed directly under a skylight in his studio at night. It is a hauntingly beautiful scene: the blue of the skies in the day replaced by the black of the skies at night; the colourful, living sunflowers replaced by their ghosts, shredding a sparkling shower of seeds.
Adding another layer to the work, Mackrell painstakingly wrote the same line on top of the image over and over again: ‘raging rage against the dying light’, taken from the Dylan Thomas poem 'Do not go gentle into the good night'. It is as if the sunflowers themselves are raging, desperately holding on to the last rays of light. But this is not a sad work, on the contrary: Mackrell gives the sunflowers a new lease of life; from plant object to art object, from positive to negative, from sunlit to moonlit. In nature, death is often just another chapter in the everlasting cycle of life.
William Mackrell, Rage rage against the dying of the light, 2020. Rayograph and texts, 245 cm x 126 cm
Sunflowers also feature in the work of Irish-born artist Daphne Wright. Part of another beautifully paired down show – titled ‘Quiet Mutiny - persists’ at Frith Street Gallery, Wright’s group of six tall sunflowers in pots could almost be the twin work to Mackrell’s Rage rage against the dying of the light.
Wright’s sculptures address the mundanity of everyday domestic life; the exhibition includes easily overlooked domestic objects such as a pushchair, a lamp, a laundry rack, a house plant. But the sunflowers stand out, tall like statues, lined up in a solemn row, heads hanging down. As in most of Wright’s work, an uncanny detail is hidden in a seemingly calm and quiet scene. It is only later that I notice that the sunflowers are missing their petals and leaves. On even closer look, these sunflowers are unusually tall for flowers kept in a pot. What exactly are we looking at?
Daphne Wright, Maple Row Sunflowers, 2019. Mixed media Overall dimensions variable
Wright’s flowers move me in their nakedness. The sculptures are rendered in unfired grey clay, and this simplifying gesture reduces the flowers further to their essence. Like William Mackrell, Dapne Wright presents us with a shadow image of the sunflower’s colourful and life-affirming ‘self’, and like Mackrell’s sunflowers, Wright’s sunflowers take on an almost human presence. Both artists play with an idea, a metaphor of the sunflower, and both their interpretations - although in very different media - lend the sunflowers the same powerful feeling of vulnerability.
“Futile acts for futile times”, says Cammock’s voice halfway through the film They Call it Idlewind. But these three works by Helen Cammock, William Mackrell and Daphne Wright are the most honest, most moving artworks that I have seen in a long time. Maybe our present times call for small gestures, quiet acts of mutiny, the permission of idleness. Like sunflowers facing the sun, these artworks capture rays of light in an otherwise dark period and remind us to cherish that what is real, that what is closest, and that what is dearest to us.
Helen Cammock, I decided I Want to Walk, Kate MacGarry, London until 17 October 2020
William Mackrell, Lungley Gallery, www.lungleygallery.com
Daphne Wright, A Quiet Mutiny - persists, Frith Street Gallery, London until 14 November 2020