Goings on
with fritha jenkins
Aggregate: Fritha Jenkins & Edna Lumb, curated by Catriona McCara, Bleinhem Walk Gallery, Leeds. March - April 2018.
An exhibition as live curation/performance, Fritha worked in dialogue with the paintings and archive of industrial landscape painter Edna Lumb, interacting with materials, site, text, gallery visitors and staff, and workers at a quarry site. The exhibition shape shifted as it went along and conversations, group investigations, site visits, archive materials, fed directly into the work across the weeks. Roy Claire Potter collaborated and performed in the final performance on the last day of the exhibition.
Performers: Meg Jenkins, Martha Margetson, Sophie Yetton, Catrionia McCara, Matt Wheeldon and Stuart Hanson. Glass work in the show was made by Gayle Price, (Glass blower, Chemistry Department, University of Leicester) the pieces were developed in conversation with Fritha Jenkins in her lab. Cut and quarried stone was donated by The Mone Brothers from the quarry site which Edna Lumb painted at. https://monebros.co.uk/aggregate-success-art-exhibition/. Photographs by Hamish Irvine, Stephen Goodwin & Fritha Jenkins. Polaroid photographs by Stuart Hanson. Video, Fritha Jenkins.
All images are moments photographed across the run of Aggregate. Alongside Edna Lumb paintings and archive, other materials brought into the space included; Thames river water collected from under London bridges, glittery rocks from the abandoned quarry (where Edna painted 'Abandoned Quarry), mud from the curator and Fritha Jenkins' boots collected during performances and site visits. Stone from a working quarry (where Edna painted), surgical gloves filled with bath water after the artist bathed, Thames foreshore stones, video footage of Fritha Jenkins and flatmate dancing in the kitchen.
“Habitual disorientation leads me uncertainly to Leeds Art Gallery, but when I glimpse a chair, heap of rocks, and things, giving an visceral sense of stuff happening I know I have found Aggregate: Fritha Jenkins & Edna Lumb. Entering the space, which sits somewhere between the domestic and the studio, you are immediately part of that happening; and you feel compelled to immerse yourself in the objects around - letters are heaped tantalising in piles on a shelf, images lie next to one other, bits of text float or are stuck on the floor. Everywhere are rocks, stones, loved detritus and tools of work, books sheaved with notes, peculiarly shaped glass vessels, awkward pillows of dank water; all placed with an openness that allows a 2 year old to pick up the rocks and investigate/consider. It all suggests an ongoing and working relationship with all the material, one that is thoughtful and loved, entirely lacking in artfulness or pretension of any sort.
The tangible sense of multiple conversations held within the objects continues through the performance, which begins so subtly that you suddenly realise you’re deeply inside it. Fritha Jenkins and Roy Claire Potter move, weave and fall through the space and around the objects.
Narratvies of friends and lovers, of landscapes and stones, appear and sound - on scraps of paper, on the bodies of the performers, spoken through letters, as stories, as overheard or remembered fragments of conversation; through song and dance. It might sound like too much but it isn’t; its generous and rich, layered, tender and thoughtful. I want to see it again but I feel as though that couldn’t happen. It feels like living through something real; in a way that you want performance to be, but that it so rarely is. It all feels uncannily everyday and unusual at the same time; like one of those once in a lifetime conversations which keeps coming back to you, forever. ”
Video is a collage of some of the videos which were made and shown during Aggregate, sound from the final performance, audio recording from site visits, performances and conversations. Song is Donna Summer, I Feel Love.
Some of the Edna Lumb paintings included in Aggregate, From left to right Horsforth Quarry, Abandoned Structure, Sandpit (Horsforth Quarry), Photos credit Hamish Irvine. Photo of Horsforth Quarry 2018 taken by Stephen Goodwin during a visit with Fritha Jenkins and Catriona McAra.