think of those flowers that you plant is an exhibition of work by four artists; Ashish Avikunthak, Emma Cousin, Milly Thompson and Jacqueline Utley. The show is a nod to Stuart Morgan and Frances Morris’s curatorial concept for the show ‘Rites of Passage’ that showed at Tate in 1995, and in particular their idea of the artist as a ‘passeur’. This according to Morgan in his catalogue essay, is a person who “moves people or things across borders into forbidden zones” with particular reference to key moments in life, those rites of passage. Tate would later describe the concept as “art’s capacity to confront and mediate life’s experiences” in a subsequent display in 2002 that was a memorial to Morgan.
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In the opening scene of Ashish Avikunthak’s film Vakratunda Swaha (2010) we see a man walking slowly into a river. He carries a statue of the Hindu god Ganesh, on his head. Slowly he immerses the statue into the river a number of times, before leaving it submersed. The statue has a garland of flowers around its neck and petals float in the river around it. The man pours water onto his own head and through his long hair, turns around and heads back to the shore. After this opening scene, the screen goes black and text informs the viewer that the footage was shot in 1997 and is of the artist Girish Dahiwale, who passed away a year later. The rest of the film might be understood as a requiem to Dahiwale. It meditates on the cycle of life and death as well as rituals, such as the Hindu practice of tonsure (shaving one’s head as an act of mourning). We watch as a number of seemingly ritual acts unfurl in an increasingly abstract film where the characters swap roles, and morph into the figure of Ganesh through wearing masks that visually echo the elephant head of that god.
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Of course it is wildly grandiose of me to reference a show that filled rooms at what is now Tate Britain to an exhibition that fits in a first-floor gallery space that is probably around 400 square foot. There were individual rooms in Morgan’s and Morris’s show that were bigger than this whole gallery. But I guess ‘Rites of Passage’ has stayed with me over the years, and somehow I wanted to recognise that. In part it was because I got a tour of the show with Morgan one morning before the show’s normal opening hours, just Stuart, me and the security guards. I was an intern at an art magazine that Stuart wrote for, and I had asked him about his show. In return, he asked me if I’d like to visit it with him. It was a generous act. Partly because I remember the show unabashedly dealing with the big things in life; ageing, death, the imprint of the past on the present and possible futures, at a time when irony ruled. In part perhaps because of a line in a review of the show by Adrian Searle: “But what you wanted most of all was some certainty about your place in the world.”
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Emma Cousin’s series of drawings from late 2022 depict bodies that are changing. These are bodies that are pregnant, that are internally and externally, expanding, morphing and accommodating what is growing inside them. Ribcages are pushed upwards, internal organs squashed against them. The figures in the drawings sometimes look surprised or down at their changing bodies as if what is happening to them is both entirely natural and completely baffling. When referenced in pre-20th century art (largely by male artists) pregnancy was often depicted as serene and dutiful, with the pain and danger of childbirth avoided. Cousin’s drawings are part of a new set of articulations of pregnancy that include the work of Susan Hiller, Jenny Saville and Chantal Joffe amongst others. Here pregnancy is devoid of saintly serenity or dutiful wives, and instead is suggestive of a unique moment of profound emotional and physical shifts to a time when things will be irrevocably different, where newness and a panoply of possible futures are about to enter the world.
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This show is named after a line from a poem by Rupi Kaur:
[…]
think of those flowers you plant
in the garden each year
they will teach you
that people too
must wilt
fall
root
rise
in order to bloom
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Like a number of her paintings, Milly Thompson’s painting 58 and still in clover (2022) references Ikebana, a way of arranging flowers according to ancient Japanese principles. Previous paintings by Thompson often meditate on the way society views middle-aged and older women, and reclaimed a sense of sensuality, pleasure and revelling in ageing bodies in a riposte to mainstream depictions. Thompson references Ikebana in order to question the notion of achieving bodily perfection, stating in an interview, “There’s such a high level of control there that mirrors our relationship to women’s bodies”. This painting, the penultimate work Thompson made before her untimely passing in late 2022, seems slightly different. A four-leaf clover, a traditional marker of good luck, joyously bursts above the tightly put together flower decoration beneath it. A half-drunk glass of wine at the bottom of the canvas and a wickedly-smiling female face that seems to have escaped its origins as an emoji are joyous and subversive. The painting and its title are a moment of perhaps unexpected affirmation, a moment to savour and to take one’s place in the world.
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I want to circle back for a moment. This show, the last in the premises at Ganton Street, will open twenty years on, almost to the day, of the first show I did as a gallerist. This was in an even smaller gallery that a friend and I set up on Hoxton Street. That first show was by Milly Thompson and Simon Bedwell, two of the collective BANK. It was either BANK’s last show, or their first show post-BANK, I never worked out which. So that’s been on my mind as well. These conversations that you find yourself having, they can last for years with long silences punctuating them. When we got back in touch after this gallery opened in July 2020, Milly and I initially mostly talked about Qi Gong, a set of movements related to Tai Chi, which we were both practitioners of. To its practitioners, Qi Gong is more than the careless description “a set of movements”, it’s more a personal ritual that makes no real sense but somehow works. For me, it was a way of trying to fit your interiority to what surrounds you. I realise again, this sounds rather overblown.
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There is a sense of contingency, of capturing a very private moment shared between female subjects in the paintings of Jacqueline Utley. After her return to art school to do an MA two decades after starting her BA, Utley made a number of small paintings of flowers in vases set against modest, plain backgrounds. The petals of the flowers are a little bursts of colour against the almost monochrome backgrounds. In later paintings, these flowers in vases recur in the background of the interior scenes Utley started making. Or as large individual leaves that are suddenly unmoored from their vases and magically float through the space of the painting. These settings are all populated by women, sitting or standing, talking with each other or simply co-inhabiting the same spaces. Sometimes they are working, sewing or making, sometimes they play instruments. These paintings seem to be about interiority, both in a physical and psychological sense. But flowers and petals drift in. They are a sudden, rather joyous reminder of the world outside, a reminder that interiority and the world around us can meet at the most surprising of moments.
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I want to circle back again, to the art work that this text begins with, to endings which perhaps are not endings. Avikunthak’s film ‘Vakaratunda Swaha’ was filmed on a 16mm Beaulieu R16 camera, a portable film camera associated with cinéma vérité that has the unusual characteristic of being able to shoot in reverse. In the middle of the film we see one of the protagonists walking rather precariously in the middle of a busy road towards the camera whilst the traffic moves backwards around them. And then towards the end of the film we see a protagonist smashing statues of Ganesh but the film is reversed so it looks as if that the statues are coming together into a whole from shattered fragments. Then we see more statues of Ganesh that have been immersed in a river reappear, rising upwards from the waters into the outstretched hands of one of the protagonists who wears the mask of the god. Something is being retrieved or being pieced back together. In the final scene we see the footage of Dahiwale again, moving slowly out into the river with the statue of Ganesh on his head. We are brought back to the beginning, back from the edge of things.
