Once More Unto The Breach (Repeat Ad Infinitum)

Aristotle postulated that nature abhors a vacuum; his suggestion was that nature contains no vacuums because the denser surrounding material continuum would immediately move in to fill the developing void. Politics also abhors a vacuum; as we have seen throughout the history of human existence, wherever a political system fails a new system slips in from the surrounding political continuum to fill that void. 

The work of Lou Hazelwood and Chris Graham, when working as a duo, seeks to make sense of this slippage from one state to another. In a world in which idealogical boundaries are imposed in the form of physical borders, attempting to keep people separate and living under different rules, the void is a dangerous place; but it is a place to which people flock in order to make their presence felt when ‘the times they are a changin’’.

The closest that nature has to a vacuum is the space beyond our atmosphere, a vacuum in which, conventional wisdom tells us, that nothing can survive. It is a void into which the worlds billionaires are willingly throwing themselves, inserting themselves into the slippage between the material world and nothing. Having conquered everything the earth has to offer the only thing left to conquer is nothing.

Here on earth people continue to build walls, creating and upholding ideological borders on land, imposing rules upon the sea in futile attempts to strengthen these invisible lines; lines that weave a tapestry of lies, deceit and death across the face of the earth. Just as the void of space is a danger to those with the resources to try and overcome it- in order to dominate it; so too do those whose lives depend upon movement across political divides willingly take the risk. The conquests of the worlds playboy billionaires, and they are all boys, are playtime pursuits, for those on earth that are victims of brutal regimes the need to slip from one state to another is a matter of bodily survival.

An overriding theme in this body of work is the presence of commerce and the impact of capitalism; how history is dressed to be appealing and give the appearance of respectability; through the lens of western morals of course! 

The character of Pocahontas crops up in one painting by Chris Graham, she of course is emblematic of the idea of the civilising nature of the white man. But of course the western interpretation of the story of Pocahontas is entirely fictional. Amounte, or more privately amongst her Algonquin tribes Princess Matouake, was not a teenager but was in actual fact 11 or 12, a child, when she encountered John Smith. This information changes the nature of our understanding of the story, and rather than it being a love story, it becomes one about the power of the white male. Amounte was not a Native American who worshipped white culture and christianity and was prepared to abandon her tribe for it, but was in fact a person who did everything she could to help her people. But of course the false narrative is more flattering to western society and so it is that myth that has persisted for five hundred years.

The chimney breast of the front exhibition space in the basement has been wallpapered with work by Lou Hazelwood. Images of buildings with connections to slavery, sepia tinted images of what may be plantations, photographs of rowing boats on gravely beaches, bleached out images of the sea and newspaper images of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, each one overdubbed with the noise of empire, what Hazelwood terms her Columns of Imperialism. The ‘columns of imperialism’ have garnered much publicity since 2020 in the wake of the death of George Floyd. In the United States the protests gathered strength around the immediate danger to life that Black people have to live with morning, noon and night, every day of their lives. This has led to a wider debate around the nature of white philanthropy. In the US, confederate monuments have become the target of protests that sought to shed light on the dark labours of their imperialist past, and acknowledge the sickening pall that it casts on contemporary society. In the UK Edward Colston took a dive into Bristol Harbour and we became as familiar with Colston the slave trader as many had been with Colston the philanthropist. 

The fact that we have never addressed our true past as a nation and held up slave traders as heroic, is the reason why slavery and racism persist. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez puts it “"No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars.” Going further to point out that billionaires make their money "off the backs" of undocumented immigrants and minorities. It is very easy to be philanthropic when you are giving away money that is not yours to give away. The money really belongs those who survived the middle passage. The monuments and street names really belong not to the slave traders but to those who did not survive, and were consigned to watery graves in The Atlantic Ocean.

Set at the heart of this unhappy medley of colonial hits papering the fireplace, is an old painting of a sailing ship at sea; a gift to the artist Chris Graham from a family member. Graham has subtly doctored the painting to include an inflatable life raft full to overflowing with people. Meanwhile, the sails of the boat, which would have been white canvas in the original presumably, now have the Union Jack at the front, behind that the European flag and behind that the Nazi swastika. In this image it feels as if both ships are dangerously adrift; the merciless trade winds tossing the galleon around, along with its factions and occupying forces, in an unforgiving sea. The crisis is echoed by the doubly endangered occupants of the smaller craft, buffeted as they are not just by the winds of commerce but also the dangerous wake of the larger vessel. The smaller flags at the front of the sailing ship contain a coded semaphore message spelling out ‘HELL’.

The inclusion of the semaphore flags in Chris Graham’s painting is an echo of an earlier project by Lou Hazelwood in which she staged a semaphore protest outside Drax Power Station.

On an earlier research trip to Wilberforce House Museum in Hull, an archivist came up with records of conversations showing that the Drax Power Station had been built on the profits of slavery. Could there be a starker contrast than such a symbol of power and western creature comforts being built “off the backs” of unpaid labourers stolen from far-off lands; snatched from their homes and families and forced into an agonising life of servitude and dehumanisation, all the while providing us with our progress and comfort. Hazelwood considered that “the hidden silent conversation of semaphore (a limited language) used as communication in travel (trade routes) felt like an appropriate method to communicate what I had found out about Drax. The flags were made from found negatives and the text states ‘We The Damaged’ as I performed the words ‘Capitalism’, ‘Slave Money’ and ‘The Other’ in rounds.” in front of Drax Power Station.

Two large landscape format pieces dominate the exhibition, one in the front space and one in the rear. The pieces appear abstract from a distance. Large colourful shapes slicing and dissecting other colourful shapes against a dark background. Closer inspection of the shapes reveal images, cut from old children’s magic lanterns and collaged into the overall design. Images that could be considered nostalgic, whimsical, humorous caricatures of a bygone age take on, in the context of the rest of the work, a darker tone. These two large pieces act as what Hazelwood describes as narrative scores. The images were sent to artists and musicians with a request to contribute musical scores or a performance in response to what they were seeing. Whilst the graphic score has been around for a long time with the work of such composers as Cornelius Cardew et al, Hazelwood envisions these specifically as narrative scores; not just images but stories. Arguably visual art has existed as a form of language and communication since Neanderthal man, and in this piece the international language of art, transcends the borders and laws of the spoken and written word, instead acknowledging pure expression.

On the opening night of ‘Trade Routes and Trauma Sites’ Damla Tunçer performed a live piece for solo oboe in response to one of the scores

Text: Bruce Davies | August 2020 Photos: Bruce Davies unless otherwise indicated.