THE MICK ARNOLD SET

The Mick Arnold Set © Visual Athletics Club 2012

It all started with a mug.  Or more accurately a rather beautiful porcelain mug sitting with a group of others on a table in the window of Wills Lane Gallery, St.Ives, Cornwall. It was tall and straight sided. A cylindrical object with an elegant handle and hand painted indigo blue spots.

Having purchased this one we were straight back the next day to buy another. That way we wouldn't end up fighting over who got to have tea from the Mick Arnold mug, rather than one of the mass produced Arabia mugs sitting on the same shelf.

Back in London we enjoyed drinking our tea from those mugs so much that we asked Petronilla Silver, the gallerist, if Mick could make us a teapot. Eventually the teapots arrived. We are still using ours on a daily basis - it brews a really tasty cuppa and pours brilliantly  - no dribbling.

Subsequent visits to St.Ives yielded more porcelain goodies - bowls, cups, beakers and plates. Most recently we placed a special commission with Mick for porcelain plates and bowls decorated in that same inky blue. We were not disappointed.

It's a real treat to sit down and eat from such wonderful looking ceramics - each piece slightly different yet there is a visual coherence to the whole set. For years we have been searching for studio made ceramics that combine the aesthetic and the practical - where the much quoted 'form and function' combine in the hands of a highly skilled craftsman. In Mick Arnold's work we finally found it. 

Of course, being porcelain these objects are a trifle delicate. So for washing up they get the full five star 'handle with care' treatment. Now that all the factory produced ceramics have been banished, the Mick Arnold Set takes pride of place in our kitchen!

AIRING POINTS OF VIEW

Finding postcards to send when you're on holiday has, in my experience, never been easy. I'm not sure when it happened, but sometime in the last decade it became virtually impossible to find a "visually acceptable" postcard at any seaside resort. Inappropriate greetings emblazoned across the image, crude post-production techniques, bizarre sizes veering too far away from the classic postcard format - kitsch and tacky, tasteless and tawdry - take your pick. Doubtless these are all desperate strategies by publishers to get the attention of passing holiday makers, busy with their hand held devices sending instant holiday scenes to everybody/everywhere?

Frequent visits to St.Ives, however, have yielded some brilliant examples. Godrevy Lighthouse, Cornwall by D.Noble for John Hinde Studios is a pictorial masterpiece. I have spent hours staring at that lighthouse, wondering how and when this image was achieved - the point of view, weather conditions, the photographer's patience and ultimate colouration perfectly capture the seductive ruggedness of the Cornish coast. For me it's a sublime image produced by a company that specialised in iconic views and skillfully constructed scenes.

Recently I came across 15th century angel carvings, out for an airing following restoration in 1962 from the St Ives Parish Church collection. The image offers us a unique close up of twelve of the angels who usually reside in the ceiling of the church, posed in a "team photo" and perched on what I suspect is the church wall - with a spectacular view out to sea (including Godrevy Lighthouse) as a backdrop. Again, it's a timeless image. Matter of fact - possibly. Thoughtful and carefully staged - definitely. 

The angels may appear perplexed by the bright sunlight, but 50 years later this is still a powerful and arresting photograph - a striking example of how archive images can be mobilised to raise funds, awareness, provide food for thought and give pleasure. Hopefully we can encourage other local archives, such as the all too often overlooked St Ives Museum (living as it does in the shadow of Tate St Ives and all those highly referenced St Ives artists), to publish some of the excellent images in its collection. Now that would air some different views - and histories - of St Ives!

THE SUSTAINABLE FASHION HANDBOOK: NOT SO EVERYDAY FASHION

   

   © Edward Barber, London 2009

© Edward Barber, London 2009

  

  © Edward Barber, London 2009

Three images by Edward Barber from the soon to be published The Sustainable Fashion Handbook (Thames & Hudson).

Taking the straight up street portrait as a starting point, they offer juxtapositions and visual possibilities to breathe new life into this often over used photographic mode.

Edward Barber

IN PRAISE OF THE ORIGINAL NO.8 WORK SHIRT

A portrait from the 70s, shot as a lighting test for a community project in the Whitechapel Art Gallery.  We were a collective of photographers, ideologues, academics and politicos - Half Moon Photography Workshop - producing a magazine called Camerawork and touring exhibitions all over the UK. This particular project was shot exclusively on 10x8 colour Polaroid material. Rare and expensive back then. Extinct now. Just like this blue No.8 naval work shirt that you see here.

At the time, government surplus stores were commonplace - especially in naval towns like Portsmouth - Ben Grubb's in Commercial Road, Welton's in Fratton Road come to mind immediately. They always had that same dank smell of clothing that has been in storage too long - and needed, what my Mum would have called, "a good airing". Or in many cases a serious wash and press. Buried amongst the piles of RAF great coats, olive green combat jackets, fish tail parkas and submariner roll-necks lurked the occasional No.8 work shirt. What a brilliant piece of design. Form meets function? Yes indeed - a highly resolved piece of utility work wear. Durable, yet soft, blue cotton twill (in a shade of blue that is difficult to find these days). Relaxed fit with roomy, and very handy, breast pockets (echoed a decade later in some of Katharine Hamnett's best shirts). Plus some especially handsome plastic buttons.

Sadly this triumph of rationalised design was replaced by a simpler polyester and cotton version - until the Falklands War when the shirts adhered to sailors' skin in extreme heat conditions. Easy care/drip dry cotton was then introduced along with an even more basic design. Corners as well military budgets were being cut.

The shirt in the picture has long since worn out. There's just one treasured No.8 left in the wardrobe - it's in a delicate state, but every so often it gets an airing!

ALBERTO BURRI'S GRANDE CRETTO, RUDERI DI GIBELLINA

Gibellina detail, Sicily © Visual Athletics Club 2011

Alberto Burri's Grande Cretto, Gibellina, Sicily © Visual Athletics Club 2011

Alberto Burri's Grande Cretto, Gibellina, Sicily © Visual Athletics Club 2011

As with any unknown journey spatial variants play tricks - the less travelled road winds interminably. Time passes and the kilometres become even more elastic. As the road deteriorates, literally falling away down the mountainside, tarmac folded like felt, you swerve to avoid disaster. Your voice an unconvincing squeak, as you try and laugh off your own sense of foreboding. One more bend, one more bend and then another.  No vehicles pass you. Finally, in the distance you see amongst the arid green and brown landscape a patchwork blanket of white concrete. 

A contradictory luminosity. A man made memorial to mark a sight of destruction and devastation. In 1968 an earthquake destroyed the town of Gibellina. The town abandoned, the population relocated 20 kilometres north to Gibellina Nuova. In 1980 Alberto Burri artist, sculptor, transformed the Ruderi di Gibellina, the ruins of Gibellina into his Grande Cretto, Large Crack. The street plan meticulously adhered to, the claustrophobic intimacy of renaissance habitations encapsulated in the concrete blocks and the narrow fissures for streets that separate them. This little known entombment of concrete has since been reappropriated to become a signature style for other conceptual artists.

Visual Athletics Club
Concrete Editions

ELEMENTAL MEANDERINGS

  A circumlocutory trip around my head.  An inane passage from a ricochet existence. The seemingly infinite meanderings of an internal struggle. This perpetual motion allows no respite. Holidays and high days are denied; a deluded sense of promised hiatus propels a restless mind. Time makes little allowance and sleep only intensifies the noise. The clamour inside my head all but drowns out any clarity of thought. Silence rings heavy and doleful. My voice when I hear it is so alien that it surprises me. A faded facsimile, a croak. Another redundant muscle, flabby and inconsequential - reduced to an elemental collection of tissue. Appetite has become anorexic - not starved but lacking. Stimuli of the past are rejected - discarded.  The mind moves from one impulse to the next seeking resolution. Questions haunt us in sleep and waking. The desire to communicate reduced to neologisms - an excuse to reveal nothing - a blank unconstructed response that will retain privacy, obscure and distant. Responses become little more than linguistic expulsions - too hazy to be questioned, a rebuttal, a shield.
    

   The duality of the domestic environment - where self created careful comfort resides but forms a simultaneously gilded cage. Circumstance, financial limitations turn this comfort into torment. The walls inching closer, the mind delimited by the interminable familiarity of surroundings. The soporific claustrophobia of the suffocatingly familiar. Sunshine illuminates the vestiges of a previously house proud existence. A domestic dust bowl inhabited by tumbleweeds of hair, dead skin and urban decay infiltrate the environment through every fissure. Time reduced to sucking up and wiping down, pride in the servitude of the nihilistic pursuit of cleanliness - rejected. Dust lies on dust, on dust.  Amongst all this sits the pot plant. Stoic in its refusal to die. Content to survive on the offerings of leftover residues. Bursting out heart shaped leaves delivering a symbolic thank you to the elements that sustain it. Magenta flowers that initially bow their heads, subjugated by the sun, soon face up proud, defiant almost, heralding – I am alive. The light catches on a train and bounces through the block - somehow transparent, transmutable. At night the light is blue, unworldly, it momentarily illuminates the darkened windows of adjacent domiciles and mixes with the persistent glow of the plasma screen. Suggesting scenarios otherwise unimagined.
    

   My eyesight is a villain and a friend, as the world seems to daily become a little less focused. My vision fades with the same rapidity as my looks. Nature’s way of allowing beauty to fade without us even noticing too much. As the colour drains from my hair, my skin also reduces in texture and elasticity. Each complimenting the other - here there is no antagonism, no rupture. Nature carefully choreographing an itinerary from middle age to old age. But hasn't it always felt that way. Each decade a reminder of the previous lost time - a nostalgic desire to grapple with the past and bring it to the present.
    

   The Sunday papers are a horror story - I turn each page quickly to avoid the gaze of columnist, celebrity, model, or the unwitting victim of the photographer's camera - images shot to remind us how lacking or lucky our own lives are. Are we that simple? Do we really imagine that these collisions of digital reconstruction offer any insight except those carefully mediated by journalist, PR, editor, photographer, philanthropist? Passive dupes in a holy matrimony - feeding off the detritus of another's life - scavenging for titbits - information. The idea that gossip is somehow positive, life affirming - look at them, they really are the result of some low life freak of nature and I can feel infinitely superior. Or how can I become impossibly perfect, a concoction created through the daily onslaught of vanity.
   

   I plan my constitutional. I contemplate my wardrobe. Freedom of choice overridden by an exhausting propriety. Knowledge that all choices are consequential. What shoes, coat, hat, scarf - urban camouflage or fashion dandy? To slip unnoticed through the streets or parade in peacock style? Private thoughts entombed. But there is respite echoed by the footsteps as I walk and walk and walk. I wander with no particular place in my mind but as I walk my mind expands and my thoughts escape their previous state. Air, light, wind, rain occasional rain – the aching in my feet, the burning in my calves, the heavy weight of my thoughts are exalted beyond the confines of my head. As I synthesise with all beyond the boundaries of the immediate – for a moment I move through time and space unencumbered. My skin no longer resembles the faded parchment in a forgotten volume but regains lustre. Blood pulsating through my veins as I walk and walk and walk and the further I walk the less I think of where I am going or why. Reason or the desire to have reason is admonished and all that remains is the rhythm of my feet with the earth. I feel each step and connect with every footstep as sole of shoe makes contact with concrete, flagstone, bitumen. I rejoin and centre my existence. A pole running through my being connecting me to the universe. The heaviness of my soul is replaced by the lightness of my step as possibility is once more invited in.
   

   But inevitably there is a time when I must return home. Footsteps that meet the stairs to walk up previously so light, now turn to molasses – treacle footed I laboriously climb the steps – the last few always the hardest, as exhaustion reclaims my body and mind. I am greeted as always by the impossibly optimistic spectacle of my balcony filled with more potted plants. Nature captured, nature nurtured. Gardening seems little more than an attempt to superimpose order. From the baked earth of the terracotta pots to the entombed plant, root bound there is only one prospect - to reach upwards.
   

   I close the door and remove my coat and shoes. Once more denuded from my exterior camouflage. Windows flung wide open to commune with the air that momentarily liberated this disquieted soul. Fatigue is not an acceptable state and luckily I have no desire to be acceptable. I switch on the radio in the hope of capturing that occasional beacon of hope – a voice speaking from the heart, not the usual verbatim catechisms, but the falteringly unrehearsed utterings which cut through the airwaves rapier sharp, silencing the deafening clamour of the seemingly all pervasive opinionated rhetoric. Voices goad my isolation. I continue my own existence quietly. The loud, the brash, the bullish, the belief that one day modesty, silence, thought and contemplation will replace the need to have it all. Have it all, you can have it.

BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME

Houses of Parliament, London © Visual Athletics Club, 2009

Anticipation and wonderment - the Samsonite suitcase that defies its spatial barriers and tardis-like proffers a seemingly unending supply of provisions to please one and all. A childhood memory, my father unpacking his luggage after a business trip to Rome.  Each item held up for admiration - a bottle or two of Chianti, a huge lump of Parmigiano Reggiano fashioned like a shard of sandy rock. Provolone safely ensconced in its vacuum pack, its distinctive aroma secured, air tight, from mixing with the equally impressive Gorgonzola. A visual and olfactory jolt to my memory and momentarily I’m transported to Rome and the cheese boutique on Via Collina, Micocci Antonio. I can picture the cool marble interior, the spotless stainless steel and glass counter shielding hungry customers from the innumerable cheeses on offer and the vault-like refrigerator doors to the rear of the shop, concealing the gargantuan still uncut cheeses. All the while sitting at the cassa, acting as both fortress and vantage point, the signora surveying both customers and employees as she sits and collects the money.

But there was more, two semi circles of Pane Casareccio Genzano - a whole loaf being too big to carry in one piece. Fennel bulbs the size of a small melon, onions sweet enough to eat like an apple, and fresh tomatoes for a salad perhaps or maybe use with the left over bread for bruschetta. Then there were cakes from the Pasticceria Strabbioni, a marvel of construction as tiers of card and paper revealed first a crostata – pastry covered with jam and toasted pine nuts, then a baked ricotta cheesecake spiked with candid fruit. A business trip may have denied us our father for days or sometimes weeks - but on his return he brought a little of Rome home to us in England. Our suburban Surrey dining table transformed and a family reunited with the sharing of food.

There was a time when I would struggle to bring back some delicate artefact to remind me of my holiday, often only to be disappointed as the carefully packed pristine item had transmuted en route into a relic only suitable for a mosaic. Now my luggage is filled with the spoils of a nostalgic appetite, eager to prolong the pleasure of the trip or to share it with those unable to have been there with me. 

A holiday in St Ives, Cornwall at any time of year provides a surfeit of choice for a healthy appetite - crab sandwiches, piping hot pasties, tender lamb and the freshest of vegetables. Cornwall is geographically challenged – a long peninsula that secludes it from the tyranny of the supermarket articulated lorry and secures locally produced food for those lucky enough to live there or visit.  With Cornwall voted the most favourite holiday destination in the UK and St Ives boasting sixth place in a poll of the best beaches in Europe, a trip to the South West is hard to beat.

St Ives as a headland peninsula is surrounded by the sea on three sides with panoramic skies and a variety of beaches from Porthmeor on the northern exposure for surfers, to the sheltered suntrap at Porthgwidden on the eastern side. Follow the azure blue sea further and you reach the becalmed harbour with its south easterly aspect and sun warmed sand, even in February.

It is the miracle of light reflecting back off the sea which produces a quality rarely seen in the UK. White sand lends a further level of luminosity usually associated with more tropical climes. But beyond the sea there are further cultural highlights which illustrate the magnetic draw of the land, in particular the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden. Now slightly overshadowed by its precocious but less engaging sibling Tate St Ives, this tranquil zone allows the curious to experience the working environment of arguably Britain’s greatest twentieth century sculptor. The exotic flora jostling for space with Hepworth’s sculptures is a collision of reciprocity, each lending the other a further intensity and all the while beyond the garden walls is the view – the harbour, the sea, the sky and in the distance Godrevy lighthouse, muse to countless artists.

A short stroll from the Barbara Hepworth Museum is the Wills Lane Gallery bringing “a breath of the West End to the South West”. In essence this is not the seemingly ubiquitous faux-naïve scenes favoured by most of the galleries in St Ives but a carefully chosen collection of photography, painting, prints, sculpture, jewellery, and ceramics. One of the featured ceramicists is Mick Arnold who creates an array of beakers, plates and vases made from the creamiest of English porcelain - studio pottery at its best - simple, timeless elegance that is both functional and beautiful.

But time comes to return home and consolation is offered by a little local shopping. First a visit to M Stevens and Son on Back Road East, the fish, although nearly always filleted - more for the fishmongers convenience than the customers, is fresh - Lemon Sole, John Dory, and Mackerel. Then down to S H Ferrell and Son on Fore Street to collect our preorderd pasties – twelve in all, as well as saffron bread, and half a dozen gingerbread men. Margaret has usually included an extra treat for the long drive home, some lemon biscuits perhaps and will with a days notice bake up something special, macaroons or congress tarts. From there up to I Should Coco further along Fore Street for the smoothest chocolate creations - chocolate mackerel, bars of single variety cocoa chocolate – Java is a personal favourite – gifts for friends and family…maybe! A final stop at the Floral Shop on Treganna Hill where not only do they sell flowers grown on their own allotment but vegetables also – wonderful multicoloured Swiss chard, Cornish new potatoes, the tenderest of carrots.

A last lingering walk along the harbour side and a few moments to bask in the sun and drink up the light before commencing homewards. The long journey is comforted by the smell of twelve warm pasties and the knowledge that for days and weeks to come the pleasures of St Ives will be ours to experience and share with those special few for whom we bring it all back home.

Image: Visual Athletics Club

THE NAKED CIVIL SERVANT

Quentin Crisp, Chelsea, London 1975 © Edward Barber

Quentin Crisp, Chelsea, London 1975 © Edward Barber

Quentin Crisp, Chelsea, London 1975 © Edward Barber

The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp, Fontana 

It all started in Islington. Back in 1975. I was dispatched to the Kings Head Theatre Club in Upper Street. Lunchtime. A one-man show. Quentin Crisp was the man.

I was 26 years old. A mature student on the BA Photographic Arts course at the Polytechnic of Central London. At the time this was the only degree level photography course in Europe.Now there are hundreds.

My investigation into gender, identity and personality expression was the final part of my major project. I later photographed members of the Beaumont Society. An all male membership. A spectrum from drag artists and transvestites to transsexuals living as women and working their way towards sex change surgery.

Quentin Crisp was the starting point for this inquiry. I was granted permission to shoot performance pictures at one of his lunchtime sessions, but I was far more interested in a proper formal portrait session with Mr Crisp - in his by now "infamous" bedsit in Chelsea, London (many years before he moved to the Chelsea Hotel in New York and Sting wrote the song 'An Englishman in New York' about him.

I mailed some of the black and white prints to Quentin and asked if I might shoot a portrait of him at home. A typically gracious letter arrived by return. Delighted with these prints, he would be happy to sit for me.

At the time I was an absolute purist when it came to lighting and all other matters technical. My approach was knowingly primitive and driven mainly by an interest in the subject matter. My preference back then was for window light and if all else failed I would improvise with whatever light was available or any source I could get my hands on!

Many years later I discovered the joys of carrying huge quantities of moving lighting and plate cameras and working with an entire shoot team. On this occasion I arrived with nothing more than a 35mm camera, wide angle lens, a tripod and some Kodachrome film, renowned for its wonderful colour rendering and slow response to light.

I had heard and read a lot about this room. Situated in a house full of bedsits, somewhere in Chelsea between the Kings Road and Fulham Road. I had done some sketchy research, but I have to admit, I had not read Quentin's The Naked Civil Servant, published seven years earlier. Had I done so I would have known just how much experience Quentin already had as a life class model and his ability to hold a pose for even the longest exposure.

Once in the room, I was aware that it was everything and more than I had expected. How to make sense of such an intense environment - full of disused TV sets and dusty still-life scenes. Telephone directories piled on the mantle shelf and propping up the bed. wardrobes and meat safes side by side. Travel trunks and blankets. A highly idiosyncratic place. A photographer's dream - and that's before you put the man himself in the frame. The chiaroscuro lighting amplified Quentin's stately presence. 

Could I extract just one iconic image from this place? Perhaps. Quentin made it all so easy. He could strike a pose and hold it for as long as necessary. Like all good actors and models he could take direction. 

I hedged my bets and shot three different perspectives. Quentin approved them all and promptly sent me off to show Mike Dempsey, the art director at Collins the publishers. They were looking for a cover image for the soon to be published paperback version of The Naked Civil Servant. Mike took an instant liking to the portraits and this book cover became my first ever published image. Now it's in the National Portrait Gallery collection here in London.

National Portrait Gallery 

www.edwardbarber.net

NORTH SEA NEIL

North Sea Clothing, Navy Submariner © Edward Barber, West Witterings 2010

North Sea Clothing, Navy Expedition © Edward Barber, West Witterings 2010

Q. When did you found North Sea Clothing?

A. I started up North Sea Clothing four years ago.

I have spent the past twenty odd years hunting and sourcing a diverse range of vintage items including, objects, musical instruments and clothing. The expertise, which came from handling items of high quality, led me to focus my collecting on specializing in military and motorcycle garments and accessories. These in turn were supplied by me to designers and brands seeking inspiration in the development of their collections.

Q. What led you to start the company and focus on The Submariner jumper?

A. It really came about as a response to a combination of things:  from my experience with vintage and archive pieces I realised that items of such quality were becoming increasingly scarce but were the product of a long standing tradition of manufacturing in Britain. With most companies outsourcing to the East for a cheaper alternative, the perception of British manufacturing was as being too expensive. So by producing my own updated version of The Submariner, sourcing British Wool, and using a British manufacturer I could through North Sea Clothing maintain and revitalise these links with excellence.

Q. Did you start with this one style and then expand to others?

A. Yes!  After The Submariner came The Expedition, a shawl-collared jumper with a brass shank anchor collar button, and now The Intrepid, a Norwegian style submariner with a navy/cream fleck follows on.

Q. Tell me a little about the history of this type of clothing and how you make them today?

A.  The Submariner sweater was War Office issue to the Royal Navy in both World Wars. By the 1950s motorcyclists had adopted them to wear under their jackets as a fantastically effective way of keeping out the British weather.

All these sweaters are made in a traditional way using British wool. The ecru colour is undyed wool so the lanolin aroma is still there. Lanolin gives the wool a natural waterproofed quality just as it would to its original owner in the fields during our chilly damp winters.

Q. Where is North Sea Clothing available to buy?

Currently we have retailers in England, Sweden, Japan and soon the United States and Canada. Please see website for details.

Q. Do you have plans to expand the line?

Yes. North Sea Clothing is about garments that are suitable “Whatever the Weather”, so our great British climate continues to be one of the inspirations as well as the desire to produce enduring items of distinctive quality that are made in Britain.

www.northseaclothing.co.uk 

Images: Edward Barber

JUST IN CASE YOU'RE WANDERING

Concrete Wall, Sciacca, Sicily 2009 © Visual Athletics Club

Concrete Wall, Sciacca, Sicily 2009 © Visual Athletics Club

Concrete Wall, Sciacca, Sicily 2009 © Visual Athletics Club 

We do not make concrete.

We believe in its signified longevity historically, physically and metaphorically.

Concrete Editions will deviate, explore, diversify, comment and criticise and lead you a merry dance as we range around the visual world.

Images: Visual Athletics Club