Even your shadow will abandon you
Private View: Thursday 6th of November 6.30 to 9.30
During the past two years, where some artists have been shocked, stunned and bewildered into (quite understandable) creative inactivity by the atrocities being committed in Gaza, I have found myself producing a series of work related to the genocide. Bombarded by images of the slaughter, maiming and constant displacement of thousands of people, and furious at our government’s complicity in this, and the lack of international condemnation or intervention, whilst the mainstream media flaunted its appallingly unbalanced allegiances, I have made work that fluctuates between images of death and violence, and a hope for peace.
As children and adults have had their lives, limbs and homes decimated, my urgency to produce something has resulted in a large number of swiftly executed, very low tech work; sewing, drawing and mono-printing onto anything that came to hand: tattered textiles, some scavenged old household linens, scraps of paper and cardboard packaging.
I wanted to show these simple pieces now, to keep up the conversation about what is still happening, despite a supposed ceasefire, in Gaza and the West Bank – and what has been happening for years.
The title of the exhibition comes from the poem No Art by Mosab Abu Toha, a Gazan poet, unable to return to his homeland, whose words and images on social media have been an important source of information during this time of half-truths, untold stories, deceit, destruction and despair.
About the artist:
Usually an installation artist, and concerned largely with themes of loss, absence, sickness and conflict, Maddison collects, reworks and subverts the flotsam of forgotten lives, and is gradually building a kind of museum of domestic misery.
She has exhibited widely, domestically and internationally, and has curated several shows in unexpected, or disused spaces, including I am ready for you, darling, in a former delicatessen in Kings Cross, Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress, in a First World War mortuary, and Mother’s Ruin, in an 18th Century Tidal Mill in East London, which she then took on tour to Germany.
In recent years, she has spent extended periods of time in Shetland and the Outer Hebrides, leading a sequestered existence, often building temporary installations, and filming her work, in the wind blasted landscape and its constantly changing conditions.
It has been her long held ambition to run a shop along the lines of the one in Bagpuss; somewhere full of found oddments, fragments, and personal ephemera, none of which is for sale.
@juliamaddison
30% of the sales will be donated to M.A.P.
