For her solo exhibition 'Classics' Lydia Blakeley has made paintings based on the pictures of food seen in recipe books and magazines, paintings of young men wearing leisurewear and portraits of television chefs. Together the works reflect on English society and its class system. This is a system that has undergone significant shifts in the last forty years beginning with the decline of the industrial working classes under Thatcherism, through the Blairite proclamation, "We are all middle-class now" (in fact spoken by former ship steward and later Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott) through to the divisions exposed by debates around Brexit.
Blakeley's works also reflect on an imagined community, 'Middle England', a phrase that was increasingly used by the media from the late 1990s onwards. Middle England was sited outside London (where the dreaded "Chattering Classes" lived) but was less of a specific area and more of group of people and their shared values. The visual culture surrounding food was one of the most common ways of articulating a belonging to this imagined community. And for a period of time in the 1990s, the figure who might be said to embody that community's aspirations was the television chef Delia Smith. She taught viewers of her Cookery Course television series how to pronounce ‘lasagne’ and how to roll spaghetti on a fork. Her influence was so much that she could cause a run on goods with a recommendation of it on her programmes; cranberries, eggs, Maldon Sea Salt and skewers all had wild spikes in sales after Delia talked about them. In effect she offered an achievable, aspirational vision. Blakeley's paintings of television chefs of that era and works based on images of 'fancy' food, speak to those set of aspirations. To be able to cook and nicely present pigeon or a seafood dish was a way of signalling one's ability to better oneself. Even a fondness of Smith's nemesis, Keith Floyd, a free-wheeling, frequently drunk bon viveur, was to signal belonging to a certain tribe.
Escaping from Middle England's aspirations was equally something of importance to others who lived there, namely the children of the generation learning how to cook fancy food and pronounce lasagne correctly. Whilst Delia Smith was teaching a generation born in the 1940s and 1950s how to improve themselves, their children born in the 1970s were embracing rave, jungle and UK garage, reading The Face and i-D, and saving up to buy clothes that would signal a rejection of their parents aspirations and their embrace of an alternative imagined community. UK garage in particular encouraged a careful consideration of self-fashioning, mixing pricey labels such as Moschino and Gucci with more easily affordable brands like Kappa and Reebok, a strategy to enable living the champagne lifestyle on a lemonade budget. Garage and the clothes associated with the scene had a celebratory feel, reflecting the cheeky optimism heard in the D.J. Luck and M.C Neat's lyric "With a little bit of luck, we can make it through the night". Blakeley's portraits of young men wearing tracksuit bottoms, hoodies and trainers is a deadpan presentation of this counter-culture that enabled a break away from the middle-brow aspirations of parents.
Blakeley's choice of title for this exhibition can be understood in two ways. She uses the classical genres of still life and portraiture to convey something about a moment in the ongoing articulation of English identity. But there is also a very specific reference - to the Reebok Classics that feature in one of the main works in the show. As the fashion site Wavey Garms put it: "Without wishing to sound too jingoistic, the Classic was a proper British shoe worn by proper Brits getting properly off their nut to proper pioneering British dance music, and that's something to have a proper sense of national pride in, for once."
