Smoke

About

The exhibition ‘Smoke' comprises a curious collection of material, such as museological artefacts, contemporary artworks, archive films, ephemera and everyday objects. It presents a cacophony of objects, images, texts and sounds, and spills out of the gallery with a series of performances, talks, workshops and screenings by a range of specialists, commentators and performers. The exhibition includes works by contemporary artists, a monumental tapestry by Pae White; Hayley Newman's Volcano Lady, who sports a dress that issues larval puffs; Simon Patterson's performance, Landskip, with coloured smoke in Battersea Park; Germaine Koh's installation that converts Pump House Gallery's computer activity into Morse code spurts of smoke; an experimental film by John Smith; and Henry Krokatsis' delicate fumage drawings. These are placed alongside NASA's Aerogel or ‘solid smoke', an ethnographic pipe collection, a 19th century Smoke Enema Resuscitator kit, chronophotographer à‰tienne-Jules Marey's photographs of smoke trails, a 17thcentury wood engraving of a smoking Sir Walter Raleigh being doused by a servant who thinks he's on fire, magicians' smoke-trick paraphernalia, an authentically blackened brick from the Black Country, dried Smoketree bows, examples of smokeless fuel, extracts from films such as Kate Bush's smoke-swathed performance of ‘Wuthering Heights', a 1935 documentary on skywriting, and a library of books and pamphlets on all things smoky. LAUNCH EVENT Landskip by Simon Patterson Sunday 5 October, 2pm Location: Battersea Park Free — all welcome The exhibition launch is marked by a public performance in Battersea Park of Simon Patterson's Landskip. First presented at Compton Verney in 2000, the installation brings a pastoral painterliness to Second World War camouflage testing. ‘Military smokes' (smoke-making devices) are installed by Patterson and timed to emit plumes of coloured smoke that unfurl ribbons of green, blue, red, violet, yellow and orange into the landscape.