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| Abigail Fallis |
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Essay by Tom Hodgkinson WHAT IS ART FOR? Well, apart from its obvious purpose to create objects of beauty, it also has a more radical role. For Oscar Wilde the matter was straightforward: art should attack and question the status quo. In the Soul of Man Under Socialism, he wrote: Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. So art should throw a spanner in the works, preferably a lovingly made spanner that would look good in a frame. And if the works grind to a halt and the workers run through the factory gates and into the green fields beyond, then all the better. In good art, beauty and rebellion, craftsmanship and rage come together. Life is celebrated and boredom attacked. And this is precisely what Abigal Fallis has managed. In The Fast Supper for example, the delicate ritual of the apostles at table is transformed into something comically grotesque and gluttonous: twelve pairs of disembodied hands cling on to McDonalds bags and kebabs. It’s the last pig-out, the final binge. The work paradoxically celebrates the ingenuity of man—after all, there is something spectacular and impressive about machine-made food, the sheer scale of the operation—while acknowledging that fast food is the final fling of a consumerist culture that urgently needs to readjust its priorities. On the one hand we can admire man’s achievements, even celebrate them, the dynamism and the ambition; but on the other, they’ve got us into a pretty pickle: boring jobs, boring lives, shopping as a substitute for life, environmental d isaster. Man’s greed and desire to interfere is exhausting the planet. In another sense this marrying of the twelve apostles with the iconography of fast food is a disturbing travesty: the whole point of the apostolic life was one of voluntary poverty. The apostles went around in rags and begged for food. Not for them the stuff-your-face culture of fast food But as good art should, Abigail’s work does not make simple didactic points or posit an answer. It rather shifts the light and makes us see familiar objects in new ways, it puts two ideas next to each other and in so doing opens up a dialogue: what are we eating? Have supermarkets grown too big? Has the glut of stuff that the consumer society has created led to a widening of freedoms or the opposite? Can it be right that one greedy capitalistic enterprise controls what we eat and how much we pay for it? Shouldn’t we smash the Tescopoly? How you choose to interpret the work and weave it into your own life is up to you. Abigail’s bronze casts of fish skeletons combine beauty with a comment on man’s meddling and its effect on nature. There are no longer plenty more fish in the sea, she says. The fish casts are attempts to make something solid out of a dying breed, but look oddly frail and vulnerable. Their flesh has been eaten away, leaving only the TV cartoon image of the fish: head and tail and skeleton in the dustbin. Her piece Suckers, where the word itself is picked out in lights and surrounded by 500 casts of teats from baby bottles, appears to me as a commentary on the baby industry: new parents, through simple fear and anxiety, will waste vast quantities of money on baby stuff. Who would have thought we would routinely spend £300 or more on a pushchair? It’s absurd. We are suckers: our natural lust for life, our thirst for life, is exploited by the cynical industrial world: a fool and his money are easily parted. Craftsmanship is another theme: the creative process liberated from the machines of the factory and put back into the hands of the workers. A trained blacksmith, Abgigail delights in the actual processes of making art: the technique behind the creation of the bronze fish is in itself an innovation. Nature meets man meets material. Man working with the raw materials of nature can make something new and beautiful and surprising. And who would have thought that a shopping trolley could be made beautiful? In the fantastic Double Helix (DNA-DL90), a giant DNA string represented by 20 shopping trolleys, Abigail’s imagination has created a spectacular and life-affirming thing out of the most tedious utility-based symbol of the modern Tescoverse. That symbol of death-by-boredom, the shopping trolley, is recast into the stuff of life itself. She is also laughing at the trolleys: divested of their mundane purpose, they look half silly and half dignified. The shopping trolley represents a kind of monotony and slavery: it is a dreamhole on wheels, which we push forlornly around the supermarket, adrift and lonely in the consumer purgatory. I’m all lost in the supermarket, as Mick Jones lamented in that beautiful song, I can no longer shop happily. I came in for the special offer, guaranteed personality. We live through shopping, we seek identity through our choice of purchases: “I am not therefore I buy,” as the Essex shaman Penny Rimbaud has it. For all Fallis’s concern that there are no longer plenty more fish in the sea, and that supermarkets have grown too big, this is not the voice of an earnest liberal whinger. There is a sense of humour here, all too rare in art. Her work is shot through with Carry On-style sense of bawdy, an end-of-the pier fish and chips idea of Britishness. The grabbing hands of the Fast Supper have something of the UK’s beautiful yobbery about them. Fish are inherently funny, and when you see her underpants, you can hear Sid James cackling in the background. Here are big pairs of y-fronts with Union Jacks and red crosses and Beefeaters sewn onto them. I don’t know why, but I really like them. They’re cheeky but they are also reminiscent of one of those gloriously cheapo London tourist stands which sell model double deckers and punks on postcards. When the Idler magazine commissioned a Krazy Golf course from modern artists, Abigail’s hole involved hitting the ball into a hollowed-out male mannequin wearing y-fronts. This sort of earthy comedy ensures that Abigail’s work never comes anywhere near the dry hectoring tone of a dreary Guardian op-ed piece. Funny, beautiful and deadly serious: it’s a rare combination but a great one. TOM HODGKINSON
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1993-1996 BA Hons, Silversmithing/Metalwork (2.1), Camberwell College Of Arts 1992-1993 Foundation Art and Design Studies (Merit), Waltham Forest College 1993-1995 Assistant, Ko - In - Noor Antiques 1994-1995 Assistant to Dinosaur Fabricator, Combe Martin Wildlife Park 1997-1998 Blacksmith’s Apprentice, Alf Doodie, North Devon 1997-1999 Archiving and Editorial Assistant, North Devon Journal 1999-2001 Metalwork Teacher GNVQ course, North Devon College Aug 2000 Exhibition Assistant New York, Damien Hirst Easter 2000 Children’s Art Workshops, Landmark Theatre, Ilfracombe June 2002 Organised and escorted group of Directors on a guided art tour of London, Unileaver / Faberge July 2002 Fabrication Assistant, Jane Simpson (Artist) Oct 2002 Artist Educator, Waltham Forest, London Oct 2002 Artist Educator, Crafts Council, London Sept 2003 Artist / Project Manager, Somerfield, Bristol Solo Exhibition Aug 1999 North Devon Museum, Barnstaple Mixed Exhibitions Dec 1999 Quo Vadis Restaurant, Press May 2001 Sleaze Nation Future Exhibitions Fire and Brimstone , Gallery Pangolin,
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