Exhibition Guide & Essay

Floor Plan

Introduction.

BasementArtsProject is a concept that aims to put art at the heart of daily life, an inescapable reality of its own making. Equally, the concept dictates that art must straddle the line between its own reality and the reality of daily life. Over the years our programme has reflected this constant dialogue between necessity and what is considered by many as ephemeral.

Over the years we have seen exhibitions and projects in which art looks at itself and the nature of its own existence. Dominic Hopkinson’s 2015 exhibition looked at the Golden Ratio, the Fibonacci Sequence and their presence and function in nature. Equally the work of groups such as Saturation Point, whose exhibitions survey a world of geometric abstraction and systems based art, were also very much about art examining art. Anyone who saw these particular exhibitions would no doubt agree though, that despite their intellectual and scientific rigour, they were not without a distinct soul of their own: at turns humorous, spooky or just generally thought provoking.

On the flip side of this coin there have been many exhibitions that directly address the issues that affect the world in which we live: war, brexit, poverty, homelessness, loneliness and isolation, the list goes on…

After the homeliness of Kristina Nenova’s autumnal exhibition that featured at its heart family traditions as they relate to identity, and more specifically pickling, Annabelle Richmond-Wright’s exhibition shows the malleability of a space that is in many respects difficult to use, one of the bonuses of a non-white walled space. The homely warmth of the furry green and yellow walls, framed pictures of grandma and the jars of homemade pickles, to be taken away by visitors and used during the winter months, has been replaced with something altogether different. Instead the space seems to have become some kind of crypt; the presence of human skulls in crevices suggesting at first maybe a charnel house in the making. But, this is something else; an exploration of the profound interiority of the human mind and how it copes with trauma, stress and the generally unfavourable conditions of human systems on the human condition. 

Having written all of the contextual essays for the exhibitions this year I am going to tackle this one in a slightly different way. It is important to acknowledge when our understanding fails us, and in the case of this exhibition I entered it from a point of ignorance and it has taken a lot of conversations with Annabelle and Debs (my wife and another Director of Basement) to learn about not only the issues faced by women in the modern world, but some of the history that has led to where we find ourselves now in our attempts to achieve parity between the sexes. 

I have been a regular listener to Woman’s Hour since my early twenties on the basis that it was fascinating to hear subjects being talked about from a different point of view, or things that you never heard talked about at all. The fact that Women have traditionally had only one hour out of twenty-four for five days of the week on a major spoken word channel is a big indicator of inequality. As with things such as Black History month, Pride Month and other such events it shows how Women, Black and Gay communities and other minority voices are relegated to the sidelines whilst the stale, pale, male contingent continue to demand the majority of the attention. For this essay the guiding voice will be that of the work’s creator Annabelle Richmond-Wright. Rather than me trying to explain something of which I will never experience first-hand, I will hand over to Annabelle to speak from her position of knowledge and crucially, experience. 

A Shrine

BD: Do you mind if I start by asking you about two works that seem to be ‘of a piece’? These being ‘Instrument’ and ‘Shrine’. Could you talk a bit about the three people to whom the shrine has been created and their connection to the ‘instrument’ opposite? 

ARW: When I was researching the history of gynaecology and contraception, I found out about Dr J Marion Sims who was an American Gynaecologist, and was hailed as the ‘father of gynaecology’. He invented the speculum by the horrific means of purchasing black slave women to experiment and practise surgical interventions on their bodies. 

The speculum was born out of an epiphany to create this device to replace a gravy spoon he was using to dilate the vagina. I felt extremely angry and disgusted by this, and I felt grief towards the particular three women; Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy, whom he experimented on the most. There are written accounts about these women by Sims in his personal journals too. Pieces of history influence the things I make, particularly when I feel that it is important to highlight the connection of the past to the present, as such the speculum hasn’t changed a whole lot in its design and is still an intimidating and uncomfortable device. It has not been designed by a woman for women.

The works ‘shrine’ and ‘instrument’ are objects that could be used in a surgical room, although separate works, they are communicating to each other. Shrine is a silver metal trolley which is serving a stack of dark stained papery cloth that resembles food or something sanitary. 

The cloths were a by-product in the development of another art work in the show (fool me twice, but never thrice), and I felt there was a similarity to how those women were treated, like a discarded material. I see them as partly flesh, partly discarded material and it makes me think about the hierarchy and value of materials and objects, but also about women and race in healthcare. 

‘Instrument’ is a kind of rudimentary spear I forged out of steel, piercing through a stack of these cloths. I am thinking about the emotions around attack, or revenge, but also thinking about the violence in this dark history. Lately, it's made me think about the spears used by tribespeople for hunting. 

When I show you this, tell me what you see.

BD: The trolley definitely operates somewhere between the genteel silver service trolley used to serve sandwiches and tea in someone’s living room, and the trolley often found in doctors surgeries holding a kidney shaped dish, test tubes and blood pressure monitor. The presence of the silver platter on the top layer amplifies the food aspect; cheese toasties, pizza slices etc… yet the presence of what appears to be a Rorschach Test on the bottom layer reinforces the medical connection. Do you want to say a bit about that?

AR-W: I was intrigued to see if I could use my menstrual blood as a medium for painting and how that would feel for myself. I had been looking into pagan and indigenous rituals that had to do with honouring the blood, sometimes giving it back to the Earth as menstruation was seen as a time of strength, fertility, creativity, and powerful spiritual connection in those communities. I decided to create with it rather than throwing it away. It felt special to love myself in that way. Menstrual blood is as clean as the rest of the blood in the body, and it has stem cells in it. Science is showing it has the potential to be used for cell therapy, yet it has been shrouded in the dogma that it is dirty, shameful and taboo. I didn’t intend to create a Rorschach test, I was just going with the ‘flow’. I think it has created an interesting link between mental health and blood.

BD. Yes, the domination of newer religions over pagan society has set that particular cause back at least two thousand years. I’d like to turn attention now to another work based on your comment about the sanitary product/pepperoni cheese slices being a byproduct from a work on display in the other exhibition space ‘Fool Me Twice But Never Thrice’ Where did this extremely labour intensive work begin?

Fool Me Twice But Never Thrice

ARW: It began with wanting to make work about the copper coil and I realised I had a box of 2p ‘coppers’, I didn’t have a studio at the time so I was just using whatever was available to me. I can’t remember my exact thought process as I started this in 2021 right after finishing uni, next thing I made a cardboard maquette to test if I could create a structure. It’s taken a long time developing conceptually to what it is now.

BD: I’m intrigued by this labour of love and the effort that it has taken to bring it to fruition. The work is a dress that consists of 1400 two-pence pieces, with 9000 holes drilled to allow you to fix them together. Now I say that it is a dress but the sheer weight of the work suggests something else. Do you want to talk a bit about that?

ARW: Well it is armour for me, the technique I used to create the dress resembles chain maille which was commonly used as armour in the 3rd century. By bridging that into 2024 and into a body of work about reproductive health, I am saying that it has been a battle to access decent reproductive care and health. Or I/We have fought to be understood,  or to have our voices heard. Most of us are still fighting. It has been a crazy process and I have wanted to give up a few times, but I had to keep going, and I think that is quite meta in terms of how my own journey in reproductive health has affected my mental health in the past. 

Fluoxetine

BD: This links to another major piece in this room which is the ‘Fluoxetine’ pill packets some of which are laid out on the shelf, other’s scattered amongst the burnt debris around the base of the dress. Can you tell me the connection between the Fluoxetine (antidepressants) and the reproductive aspect?

ARW: The bronze fluoxetine series were made in 2019 whilst on a residency at the Scottish sculpture workshop. At this point I wasn’t much concerned with making work about reproductive or mental health but took the packets on a whim to try sandcasting. These were my packets which were prescribed to me when I was struggling with my mental health a few years ago and simultaneously using hormonal contraception. It wasn’t until last year that they became significant in my investigation in the connection between mental health and hormonal contraception use. The doctors have never validated that hormonal contraception causes depression but there’s plenty of research out there to say otherwise, and I believe it does from my own experiences.

BD: That is interesting in relation to the current debates around the medicalisation of depression and over-prescription of drugs to combat what harsher critics refer to as ‘just feeling a bit sad’. This does suggest something about how we view medicine, pharmaceuticals being a large and lucrative market as the pandemic proved. It is no coincidence that when you visit the doctors they are usually writing on pads with pens that are chock full of advertisements for various drugs, just a gentle reminder as to what brands are available as they sit and listen to people's ailments and figure out what to prescribe. What you describe shows treatment as a continual forward motion. To treat X we do Y but when Y causes Z we do not go back to X and try a different route but work out what the X+1 stage is. Potentially making things more expensive to the NHS and lucrative to the pharmaceutical companies. Alongside the bronze, copper also occupies a lot of space and significance in this exhibition. Can you tell me the reason for that?

ARW: The use of copper is a direct reference to the copper coil I had, which was the main reason why I started this work. I was pissed off with the impact of the lies, misinformation and negligence had on my body and mental health from years of different contraception. I opted for the copper coil as it is marketed as non-hormonal which suggests it will not create the same awful side effects as hormonal contraception. I acknowledge that the copper coil is a great solution for some people and sometimes there are no complaints, but the medical industry definitely is not wholly honest about the complications and that it really does affect your hormones, but in a different way. The symptoms crept up on me after a year and I thought I was developing PMDD (premenstrual mood disorder) amongst other things. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence online from Facebook IUD awareness groups, with thousands of women all saying similar things. I've seen people have to have hysterectomies because the IUD has broken and been embedded in their womb/uterus. The little piece of paper that comes with the IUD warning you about side-effects is seriously downplaying the statistics. Since then I've come off all contraception and feel the best I've ever felt and have learnt far more about my body. I am fully connected with my hormones and natural cycle of things, which is one of the most empowering feelings a woman can have in my opinion.

I might have gone on a bit of a tangent there, but copper is also the alchemical symbol of Venus/Aphrodite, the goddess of lust, desire and love, so I found that an interesting link to my work too.

Psychosoma

BD: No not at all, It is interesting to see how all of these things sit together, how you can literally wander from one work to another and always find a link, sometimes quite tangential and at other times explicit. There is a real sense of coherence in the different stories that are being told. Which brings me to the last sculptural work in the show: what appears to be a set of legs set apart in stirrups? 

ARW: Yes, so this work was made in response to the experience of my first pap smear which happened after having the IUD fitted. My nanna died of cervical cancer so I didnt give it second thought, in fact, I welcomed this opportunity to assure my reproductive health. Suddenly upon arriving for the appointment, my body was overtaken with anxiety and fear; teary and shaking. I felt no premonition of worry, I believed I was calm and grounded, ready to get on with it.

It was a light-bulb moment when I realised the previous gyno-related experience I had was having the IUD fitted, about a year before, and what a horrific experience it was. The pain made me faint on the table and the whole ordeal was so tense and scary. The pain was nothing like ive ever experienced and I still remember the intense rush of heat that permeated my whole being. Even the doctor looked worried when I said I was driving home and advised me to eat a chocolate bar. The body remembers what the mind has forgotten; trauma, pain and stress. I am still annoyed how I was not prescribed any strong pain relief or even advised to take paracetamol before. I drove to my appointment because it was convenient for me. If this is not advisable and potentially dangerous then why wasn’t I made aware of this? Here is a link of a current campaign which has accounts of women who have had the exact experience as I have. https://www.change.org/p/offer-better-pain-relief-for-iud-insertions-and-removals/feed

So, the title of the legs is ‘Psychosoma’, referring to the mind-body link, which describes the mind and body as being intertwined and complete. The legs are made from silicone cast from the kind of chicken skin you get when you are excited, euphoric, and also terrified or angry. The feet are cast from my body with my toes scrunched up - depicting the heightened state of the nervous system. Stitched together with nylon thread, I was feeling along the lines of being a medical experiment, or Ed Gein / chainsaw massacre furniture. The art work is bold, unsettling, and quite dramatic in its form and position. The black frame (that the legs are positioned on) is tall enough to make the crotch eye-level to enhance the feeling of performativity, or as being exposed on display. I sculptured small creatures for the base which stabilises the sculpture, painted in the blackest black paint, as the kind of underbelly of this whole medical experience we are made to endure in this life.

3D Rendering of ‘Fool Me Twice But Never Thrice’

Lunchtime Conversation: Sunday 8th December |12-2pm

But this is not the end…

Summer 2024 - ongoing:

I’ve Got You, You’ve Got Me Workshops

Over the course of the summer months, Annabelle Richmond-Wright along with BasementArtsProject ran a series of casting & clay workshops that involved local schools and community centres.

These workshops were designed to engage the widest possible range of ages and abilities from the immediate community. Our youngest participant was 4 years old and the oldest in her 80’s. The concept is to produce a public sculpture for South Leeds that incorporates the work produced by the community at these workshops in the final design. Therefore, the important aspect of these workshops was to ensure that everybody was able to produce at least one element that could be used as part of the sculpture.

Towards the end of the summer term we worked with Beeston Hill St Luke’s Primary School, New Bewerley Primary Community School and Cockburn John Charles Academy Secondary School. Throughout the course of the summer holiday we then worked with Hamara Healthy Living Centre and St Luke’s Cares Charity Shop with a broader cross section of the community.

Over the course of three months we were able to generate a vast amount of work from the workshops which we are now looking at how they will fit into the designs of the artist.

Despite a financial setback in terms of the production of this part of the project, things are still going ahead. The designs continue and the work produced by the community will eventually see the light of day, with offers of lighting by night from Leeds City Council when we eventually manage to get it fabricated and in place. The site, organised long ago -before the pandemic- is still there for us and it will eventually be a striking work at a busy junction for visitors arriving in Leeds from the motorway.

A Cultural Gateway

BasementArtsProject is dedicated to raising the standards of our built environment and the aspirations of the community that live here. The participation of community in the construction, design and completion of artworks as part of the public domain is essential to ensuring that the community are in control of how the area develops. A quote that I always keep in mind with all projects such as this runs thus:

BasementArtsProject does have form on achieving such projects as with ‘The Corner’ Pocket Sculpture Park featuring ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ by Keith Ackerman. A 9ft 7tonne Tadcaster Limestone sculpture located approx 90 yards from where Annabelle Richmond-Wright’s ‘I’ve Got You, You’ve Got Me’ will be located. This sculpture was produced in situ at the edge of Tunstall Road over the course of a year. Having talked to the passing public as Keith and his technician John Barber produced this piece, we were then able to engage the community in direct carving workshops in which they produced two stone benches. A piece of land only previously associated with anti-social behaviour, flytipping and drug use has become a place in which people stop to have lunch or let the children play whilst waiting for the bus.

We have two more projects lined up for this 100 yard stretch of road from the motorways up Tunstall to Dewsbury Road beyond Annabelle’s work. One of which we hope will be a mural on a gable end with Devonian artist, recent graduate and member of the Society of Women Artists Chloe Harris.

And… a sculpture ‘Nature of Balance’ donated by artist and previous exhibitor at BasementArtsProject Dominic Hopkinson MRSS which we hope to get permission to install just a bit further up the road from the black gable end/mural on the right-hand side. Currently in a terrible condition in the manner that ‘The Corner’ Pocket Sculpture Park once was.

We hope you will join us as we attempt to make radical changes to the fortunes of this area and the artists that elect to work with us to achieve this.

Bruce Davies