Listen!
We have heard of the glory in bygone days
of the folk-kings of the spear-Danes,
how those noble lords did lofty deeds. BEOWULF
And we did listen. This old English poem that has survived the centuries is testament to our addiction to tales of grand or terrible deeds. From the lofty works of the classical authors to the weeks Eastenders we revel in tales that could easily written off as mere entertainment however they leave a residue on our psyche that is unmistakeable and none are more potent than the stories we tell about our own homes. Tales come, go and re-emerge when they become relevant to us and I honestly feel that in my project I have blindly stumbled into a world hiver to unmentioned where these yet to re-emerge and subtlety poignant tales wait to be retold. Not only retold for the sake of a ripping yarn but because in their way these stories have something to tell us and if we think on them we may find the deeper truths of why they are again been resurrected.
London is a large part of the fabric of what has as far made up my experience of life. In terms of artistic practice it has inspired me and provided though its everyday comings and goings with endless materials. London is being transformed, being polished and made presentable for the world in 2012. It is from the crucible of London’s clean up that I thought of my project and was gifted the raw materials for its creation. It is of course a continuous process of change in cities but the scale of the current wave strikes a chord with the tales of the blitz that are common place in east London where I grew up. Due to the destruction of the blitz there was stimulation of exploration of the city with fresh eyes in both the new cratered landscapes of the bomb sites and the uncovering of the hidden past such as the discovery of the London wall after a particularly bad night of bombing. Our neo-blitz is benign for the most part but there is important shift which I felt needed marking. As the city races to renew I was struck by the laying down of this new stratigrophy over the familiar city. We are living atop a pile of such past iterations of London like a buzzing film of life floating on the cover of a book.
I chose to delve within the pages of London and fashion its tales from its own shattered windows. Glass is the new preferred medium of the contemporary city but has always had an almost mystic quality. The transparent and reflective elements have always in the human mind been portals to different realms; I chose to use this aspect of glass to tell tales. The images of London have distilled through the fabric of each pane of glass which to my mind gives it a relic type quality; this makes the glass itself central to both my method of creation and my projects ideology as both intellectually and physically I am attempting to trap and present images of the city which these panes have been doing all along. The fragility and transparency of glass is well suited with my themes due to the tendency of people looking straight through them while being surrounded by these tales and the short span of time that they are around before being shattered and removed to make way for the next gripping tale. The trouble I have found is presenting these tales in a manner which viewers can discern as by their very nature they go unnoticed.
The stories I hope to bring to light are a varied mix of history, folktales, myth and clear fiction. Each of these have in common they’re quality in communicating the character of London and the often grim atmosphere which bubbles just below its street corners. The stories of London tell just as much about people as they do the city itself as we are defined by the stories that tell and that we allow to endure. As an example the story of Sweeny Todd (the demon barber of Fleet Street). The story originate in the penny dreadful publications which were often reactionary to issues of the day, the story of Sweeny Todd stems from a real issue at the time of unchecked food standards where street food often contained a mix of any animal that was hanging around. From this beginning it has been transformed to fit with the worries of the new audience for social reform to psychotic revenge it keeps adapting to its reader experience or fascinations. As my interests lay in history and the original context of these stories I am in a strange position of being able to view their modern iterations from the outside and create pieces which straddle both worlds.
The pieces that I create are affected by this meeting of past and present in style and process of creation. With the cutting by hand of the glass panels which is very much an outdated process there is a connection to the past and at the same time the drawing style is very much a product of our age due to how much it owes to comic book art with its institution of line work and a panel based style in the begin of the project. The later three dimensional pieces are also drawings as would be clear to anyone watching me wield the pen like glass cutter. This is important to me as although these pieces could be machine cut to perfection they would lose the human quality that I want to invoke in the same way that oral tradition and hand written manuscripts are inherently more personal than the mass printed word. In more selfish terms I want to chalk my own version of these tales onto the pavement of history for the reason that I myself love the subject. It is in this guise of barbarian historian that I continue into the world of contemporary art.
Glen Riches
