A Life in Art

Part Two

Two Turner Prize winners and a taller-than-average 9 year old

I was incredibly lucky that on rainy days it was the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern where my sister and I would be taken to run up and down and wear ourselves out. I was even luckier that I had a mother, who despite feeling incredibly awkward doing anything artistic, would dutifully take the pencil and paper I would hand her as we walked into a gallery and sit and sketch next to me. The first time I ever made her sketch with me was in the Turbine Hall, in 2005, and Rachel Whiteread’s 'Embankment' was the installation.

Whiteread was awarded the Turner Prize in 1997 for her work ‘Untitled (House)’, a to-scale terraced house in London’s East End. This, and ‘Embankment’, are part of a larger series of public commissions which draw on the idea of the container, and familiar and domestic settings and objects. My memory tells me that the boxes were paper-thin, towering in stacks that you could walk between and around, and that they made up a vast city. I know now that they were polyethylene casts of different cardboard boxes, inspired first by a box containing her deceased mother’s belongings. You could indeed walk between them, sometimes encountering others and sometimes finding yourself disorientated in a futuristic labyrinth. A paper city, a sugar-lump canyon, an Artic causeway; however you might have described it, it caused the viewer to consider scale, emptiness, structure, and compartmentalisation.

My mum still has our sketches somewhere.

In the Autumn of 2009, a time that would turn out to have a profound impact on the next 8 years for me and my family, mum and I went to see the Anish Kapoor exhibition at The Royal Academy. I was nine years old but as tall as most thirteen-year-olds.

The 2009 major solo exhibition of the 1992 Turner Prize-winning sculpture Kapoor featured some of his most iconic works, but perhaps one of the most photographed, and my most memorable, was ‘Svayambh’. Through the middle of elegant 18th-century galleries, with moulded ceilings and accents of gold, an object the size and shape of a train carriage (or perhaps a cattle carriage) moved achingly slowly along tracks. Both the object and the tracks were covered with a thick, gloopy, sticky, waxy substance. As a child I remember desperately wanting to touch it, and I’m sure most adults felt the same way. There was something so visceral, so odd, so captivating. I knew I would probably hate the feeling of it between my fingers and yet I wanted to grab handfuls and squish it in my palms. This earthy, blood-red form squeezed through the arches and left remnants covering the doorways. Kapoor is known for using pure pigments (ochres, reds, potent blues), and the red here undoubtedly reminds one of blood, suffering, and torture. So perhaps it is no surprise that links to horrific massacres, Nazi transport carriages, and excruciating labour in childbirth have been made with this work. Another work close by was a canon that had shot the same waxy, red substance at a wall. The title of the work is from a Sanskrit word, it means to be born again or to be self-generated. The slow-moving, peaceful yet powerful, and unavoidable lump in the gallery became synonymous with the passage of time, with history and travel and has come to represent (as his use of colour does too, often referencing oriental spices) Kapoor’s Indian and British experiences. Perhaps one of the biggest gifts of this artwork is that Kapoor himself has not been explicit as to what it means. I think there can be an increased intimacy with the artwork when the viewer is given total freedom to project themselves into the artwork and to let their imagination work overtime.

For 9-year-old me, to see something so beautiful, confusing, and monumental (something which was in dialogue with everyone who watched it) ‘destroying’, or at least marking, the even more beautiful surroundings taught me a lot about art. It taught me that art is allowed to invent itself and that it evolves constantly even if it does not appear to change physically.

As I dipped into the double digits of 10,11 and the pre-teen years, the solace and stimulation that I found from art began to cement itself as crucial for the good health of my soul. My memory is also much clearer and abundant, so here I shall pause to try and choose a few key moments from the years that followed Anish Kapoor’s marvellous exhibition.

I’ll need to take you to my (first) Italian phase, and that requires it’s own section. See you there.