Shelagh Wakely at the Camden Arts Centre.

The Camden Arts Centre

At the Camden Arts Centre they usually have good exhibitions on and they're free; I can't actually remember if they have ever had a bad exhibition! I arrived at the exhibition from walking on a very busy, full-of-heavy-traffic street, the Finchley Road - I wished that I had gone up to Hampstead station on the northern line and walked down through the charming and quieter streets of Hampstead to get there. At the Camden Arts Centre they show emerging artists, international artists, and more established better-known artists and they run a residency programme to help artists develop in their practice. They combine this with educational activities, public events, talks, film screenings, art performances and family activities. The Camden Arts Centre is a Grade II listed building and an Arts Council art centre; it was refurbished in 2004.

The Director, since 1990, of the Camden Arts Centre is Jenny Lomax OBE. In the 1970's she worked at the Whitechapel Gallery as part of a curatorial team set up by Nicholas Serota. This time I saw the exhibition by British artist Shelagh Wakely (1932-2011) which expanded from the Gallery into the garden and included ceramics, unfired clay sculptures, prints, videos, and drawings.

I did find interesting that she lived abroad a lot. She spent most of her youth in Kenya and later on in Brazil. She studied at the Chelsea College of Arts (1958-1962) and she worked as a textile and clothing designer in the 1960's; all of these different elements in her life are present in her work.

In gallery 3 on the floor there is a gilded black silk sheet (pic above), slashed with a knife, and the gold side of the piece reflects ambient light and should cover the room in a shimmering pool of gold, this would turn the art work into an installation piece; but I didn't experience or see this because it was a grey day so I could only observe the piece on the floor without the whole room being suffused with light.

In the room there are two gold trolleys with wilted fruit but in one trolley the fruits looked fresher than those in the other; the gallery assistant explained to me that this was because they had been made by the gallery assistants while the older fruits actually were found in Shelagh Wakely's studio. I have to admit I preferred the older looking ones - they made me think of a ghost in a room: the fruits looked greyish and lacked the golden vibrancy of the other fruits, they are like a negative. There are also organic pieces, such as tangerines, grapefruit, aubergines which are left to rot and are gilded - some are covered in gold to look wrinkled and dried.... it's about the passage of time, it reminds you how things were, vital and full of life but now they are dead.

In the middle room inside a case there is a necklace made from a string of cherries and fruits, imprisoned inside a cage of fine wire jewellery. Here again the fruits are wilted, they have been left to rot, the combination of these elements gives the piece a sense of fragility, of the passing of time, something vital has been turned  into a skeleton.

In Gallery 2 on the floor I saw a giant swirling pattern of turmeric made out of cut-outs, stencils not easy to make, as they are done in blocks to make them look like an uninterrupted piece, the turmeric with the light would cover the whole room in yellow but again I didn't experience this or see it because it was a grey day outside. I couldn't smell the turmeric either so I didn't experience the installation side of the art work, and can't say like others have said that her work goes beyond boundaries, that it floods all spaces. Nor can I say that her work involves all the senses as I wasn't allowed to touch anything due to the fragility of the pieces, but I was also told by the galleries assistant that they had worked with kids reproducing some of the pieces in the exhibition, which is great!

 In the garden there is another work of Shelagh Wakely's. I felt that the garden was actually the weakest link in the exhibition as the squares laid out there would have been better shown on a dark surface, as presented in the gallery leaflet, rather than on grass. The colour of the bright green grass was overwhelming the piece and it distracted me from focusing on the actual work of the piece and in particular the delicacy of the small pieces of silver inside was overwhelmed by the green grass. The piece stands out more on a dark surface - check pic below.

In the Garden are also works by Susan Hiller (with sounds - this was the one I liked best!) and  Alison Wilding and Richard Deacon. Another area in the garden is also dedicated to plants with  medicinal properties such as chervil, anise, angelica etc.. this is based on Wakely's own garden in North London and also inspired by a commission that Wakely did for St Geroge's hospital in Tooting, which shows her love of nature.

Lastly in one of the rooms were large drawings, doodles of bowls that turn into something quite different, concave or abstract shapes, where colour is minimally used with splashes of blues and reds predominant; some of the drawings could be considered negatives or between positive and negative, a transitory face due to their indefinite structure. There are also films in the show in which one could see Shelagh Wakely working outdoors, leaving her work to be affected by the weather and it was interesting to watch how this changed the actual pieces.