Event detail
Monkey Watering Plants charcoal and gouache on tea stained paper by John Kindness 2007
A new installation by John Kindness, curated by Gill Hedley
In October the contemporary gallery space at the Foundling museum will be disguised as an 18th century room to harmonise with the fine original 18th century rooms in the building. The space will be lined with hand painted wallpaper and decorative borders, among the Hogarthian scenes depicted are images based on Desperate Dan comic strips c. 1952. The elaborate borders, on closer inspection, are made up from the detritus of a modern fly-tipping site.
This is Belfast artist John Kindness’s first solo project in London, a city he has made his home for the past 6 years. Curated by Gill Hedley, the idea behind this installation comes from a long tradition of painted interiors in England, from medieval devotional painting (most of it now lost) to 18th & 19th century wallpapered rooms, to various 20th century manifestations like Stanley Spencer’s Burghclere Chapel, and Duncan Grant’s & Vanessa Bell’s Charleston. More recent additions to this history include Chris Ofilli’s ‘Upper Room’ and Francesca Lowe’s ‘Terminus’.
The main scenes in the work are taken from Dudley Watkins's Desperate Dan comic strips and details from William Hogarth’s engravings. A school blows up, a woman gives birth to rabbits, a freemason kisses a Papal posterior, and a composition worthy of a medieval fresco cycle, involves a tar boiler, a pig trough, a boulder and an armoured car. Kindness finds the same talent for orchestrating mayhem in Hogarth and Watkins, “...they both have the ability to make the most chaotic events seem compositionally delightful. Hogarth had a unique mnemonic system for recording events in a kind of mental shorthand, while Watkins worked at a speed which made his drawing almost calligraphic.” The images are rendered by Kindness in a hybrid style that emphasises the compositional genius of these artists and owes much to vernacular painting, particularly Indian Kalighat work.
A restrained palette of mainly indigo and umber comes from a period when more vibrant dyestuffs were heavily taxed, and ‘bluepapers’ were created by the wallpaper manufacturers of the time. The scenes are painted on large panels of tea-stained paper to allow white to be used as a colour.
There will also be original works by Dudley Watkins on display, rarely available to the public kindly loaned by DC Thomson the Scottish publishers who produced the Dandy comic books in which Desperate Dan appeared. The Dandy and Desperate Dan are both celebrating their 70th year. Morris Heggie, the Editor of the Dandy from 1986 to 2006 summed up the comic strip character saying, “Desperate Dan was beyond strong, he was a force of nature, yet he had a great innocence. One morning he would defeat the massed Apaches with a frying pan, the next he would have trouble shaving”.
John Kindness has recently been commissioned to design the mosaics for St. Patrick's chapel at Westminster Cathedral, and is currently working with RIBA award winning architects Twenty Two Over Seven on a monument to the late George Best in central Belfast.
http://www.foundlingmuseum.org.uk/exhibit_temp.php
