If there’s one exhibition you see this week…
Board the ‘flower train’
The Exchange, Penzance is currently full of surprises. For starters it has divided its main exhibition space into several different rooms, a move which surprisingly makes the gallery seem bigger rather than smaller.
Then too, there are the contents of these rooms, installations embracing photography and text by Jyll Bradley that add up to a major survey spanning some 20 years of her work and are not only surprising but stunning.
Renowned for her interest in gardens, in 2007/8 she was artist in residence in Liverpool’s historical but neglected Botanical Collection when she researched its founder William Roscoe. The book she wrote as a result of this Mr Roscoe’s Garden and her installation The Botanic Garden are a key part of this survey.
Another site specific piece, aptly entitled The Exchange is a take on the gallery’s previous existence as a telephone exchange. Centred on a telegram written by Marcel Proust, it reflects the artists long held interest in the French novelist, whose writing has inspired the title of the exhibition Naming Spaces. But as surprising and stunning as all these works are, the ‘photographic room’ which presents as it were, best in show, is that containing her Epithalamion; Song for Cornwall. The four huge canvases it holds, reminiscent of classic Dutch interior, still life and flower paintings, depicting in extraordinary, almost three dimensional clarity, the clutter found within an old Cornish flower farm barn, sing a hymn of praise to the activity that a forthcoming wedding would once have given rise to in such a place. Ironically enough, they are also a reminder of the difficulties caused to Cornwall’s flower growing traditions by the Dutch monopoly of the global flower markets.
An extension of this theme, Bradley’s new multi-site poster exhibition Flower Train a ‘first of its kind’ collaboration with First Great Western, mirrors the journey from Penzance to Paddington that the flowers once took to London markets. Intended as a train of thought for passengers, her images, photographs of the places and people of Cornwall’s embattled flower growing tradition are paired with poetic texts suggestive of mutable connectivity. The final destination of her train of thought is The Exchange where no less than 4,000 posters await passengers and gallery visitors to be taken away as a gift, rolled up and bound by the same elastic bands that draw the flower farmers’ flowers together.
This is a ‘must-see’ exhibition, as extraordinary as it is excellent.