Putting the Fabulous into the Fantastical

 Alex Michon visits Fabulation at All Saints Cambridge 

 

‘So’, I ask, genuinely intrigued, ‘What does Fabulation mean?’ Toby Upson, one of the four exhibiting artists in this show gives me the somewhat enigmatic answer, that it could be ‘Doing whatever you want, whenever you want to do it!’. 

‘It’s such a great word’ I reply, ‘With just a hint of camp about it’

Upson smiles knowingly but our conversation is cut short as he gets distracted by one of the many visitors to the show and I move on with the distinct impression that he has more to tell me. Subsequent online searches define it as, ‘the act of relating false or fantastic tales or in literary criticism; a style of modern fiction, similar to magical realism’ But more of this later.

 

The exhibition’s venue, All Saints’ Church in Cambridge can truly be described as magical. Known as The Painted Church, designed by the architect G F Bodley around 1870 it is a notable example of both Gothic Revival and Arts and Crafts styles. This Grade 1 listed building ceased to be a place of worship in 1973 and has been under the care of the Churches Conservation Trust since 1981. 

Decoration in All Saints, Cambridge, photo Adrian Powter

The church is noted for its ornate decorated interior; the painted wall and ceiling decorations, were applied by the Leach Studio (one of the team of artists was David Parr, whose modest but lavishly decorated house is open to the public in Cambridge) and feature Pomegranates bursting with seeds, flowers running riot, and the repeated use of religious symbolism such as the sacred monogram and the fleur-de-lys, and the stained-glass east window was designed by Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and Ford Madox Brown. The church is now used for both worship and non-religious events, such as concerts and this, its first art exhibition. Thus, on one of the first gloriously spring Saturdays in March, I find myself at Fabulation, interested to see how this mix of secular and sacred, old-school craft and contemporary art could possibly be played out. This two-for -one visual experience proves surprisingly serendipitous and a veritable treat for mind, eye, and dare I say soul.

Fabulation at All Saints, Cambridge (with work by Luke Burton), photo Adrian Powter

Each of the artist’s individual works responds to the venue in strikingly unexpected ways; subtly responding to the Painted Church without obviously calling attention to the mythologies therein, religious, or otherwise. Rather one must navigate the church’s interior coming across each new artist’s narratives in a cornucopic Alice in Wonderlandish fashion.

 

Toby Upson’s work in the exhibition is influenced by Oscar Wilde’s essay The Soul of Man under Socialism from 1891. In it Wilde expounds a libertarian socialist worldview with a critique of charity. I was shocked that I had never heard of this Wildean work. Morris’s socialism is, of course, well known and it is typical of Upson that he took a sidestep from making the more obvious link with Morris, introducing, this viewer at least, with a hitherto unknown side to Wilde.

Toby Upson, cite Oscar Wilde (1891), 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism' (in the Painted Church), 2022, varying lengths of nay and gold print 12mm tape cassette ribbon tape, gold-coloured safety pins, and church kneelers, photo Adrian Powter

Upson has taken snippets of text from the essay and printed them in gold on small blue satin ribbons which he has subtly attached to similarly coloured kneelers lined up in a pew at the entrance to the church. Once discovered, as they as so delicately and unobtrusively displayed, they sang to my soul! How wonderful, I thought, to have a remembrance of The Beatitudes with their original socialist intent in a church setting. These agitprop-like sayings such as, ‘The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is’, ‘In consequence of the existence of the private property, a great many people are enabled to develop a certain very limited amount of individualism’ and, ‘In the present state of things[...] the people who do the most harm are the people who try to do the most good’, suggested to me, not only a subtle dig at establishment do-goodery, but the call to arms for individualism echoed Toby’s original brief of ‘doing what you want whenever you wanted to!’ 

Toby Upson, cite Oscar Wilde (1891), 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism' (in the Painted Church), 2022, varying lengths of nay and gold print 12mm tape cassette ribbon tape, gold-coloured safety pins, and church kneelers

Luke Burton, John Ruskin Surrounded by I Sores, vitreous enamel on copper, photo Adrian Powter 

Luke Burton’s vitreous enamels on copper reminiscent of jewellery, archaeological fragments, miniature paintings and ex-voto offerings are little gem like finds surreptitiously and sometimes cheekily placed throughout various architectural niches within the church interior. The diminutive scale of these fictionally precious pieces, with their suggested critique of overblown grandness served as a respectful counterbalance to all the finery therein. A cigarette in an ashtray found nestling in a pulpit, suggesting the vicar had had a quick drag of a fag, and a group of ne’er-do-well choristers atop the organ, were particular favourites, adding a maverick touch of ‘carry on up the cathedral’ humour to the event.

Luke Burton, Choristers, vitreous enamel on copper

Cathy Lomax’s paintings, Five Saints, were made in response to the female saints depicted in the church’s stained-glass window. Lomax is known for her film paintings so her decision to cast her saints as film stars was no coincidence. Cinemas have often been compared to cathedrals with both suffering a similar trajectory of closures in the late 20th century. ‘Cinema had apostles. (It was like religion.)’ wrote Susan Sontag in ‘The Decay of Cinema’ in the New York Times. Similarly, Camille Paglia in an article for the Smithsonian writes,

 

 My first moments of enchantment by beauty occurred in a church and a movie theatre. The interior of St Anthony of Padua church in Endicott, New York […] was lined with richly coloured stained-glass windows and niches holding life-size plaster statues of saints in sumptuous robes or silver armour. Paying no attention to the action on the altar, I would stare transfixed at those glorious figures, which seemed alive. At the theatre downtown, I was mesmerized by the colossal Technicolor images of Hollywood stars, who seemed as numinous as living gods.

Cathy Lomax, Saint Catherine, 2022, oil on canvas, 60x45cm

  

Lomax’s paintings highlight this celebratory equivalence of worship. As a cineaste her painter-as-casting-director choices are far from arbitrary. St Catherine (of Alexandria) is ‘played’ by Kiki Layne, the African American actress known for her recent appearance in If Beale Street Could Talk. This is an important re-education, as coming from Alexandria, Catherine would obviously have been dark skinned. In the stained-glass window she is depicted as a floaty Pre-Raphaelite muse with no regard to her cultural heritage. Catherine was reputed to have been martyred around the age of 18 for her conversion to Christianity and yet her historical existence has recently been disputed. In her book The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Early Medieval Europe, Christine Walsh writes, ‘the cult of St Katherine of Alexandria originated in oral traditions from the 4^th century persecutions of Christians in Alexandria. There is no evidence that Katherine herself was a historical figure and she may well have been a composite drawn from memories of women persecuted for their faith.’ This historical mythmaking adds another interesting layer to Lomax’s saintly re-inventions. Accompanying her larger paintings Lomax has added some ex-voto offerings; smaller paintings located around the pews. These give further insights into the often-absurd things that the saints have become known for. For instance, Hats for St Catherine relates to the French tradition in which unwed women of 25, known as Catherinettes, wear richly decorated bonnets on the day of her feast. 

Cathy Lomax, Ex-Votos for Saint Catherine (Eyes, Hats, Spiral Staircase), 2022, oil on card

Ingrid Bergman, (who played a nun in the Bells of St Marys (1994) is the model for virgin and martyr St Dorothy, shown in her painting surrounded by flowers since she is the patron saint of gardeners. Although nothing akin to martyrdom, Bergman suffered a fair bit of persecution herself when she had an affair with the director Roberto Rossellini. The star was denounced on the floor of the US Senate, with senator Johnson saying that she had perpetrated ‘an assault on the institution of marriage’, and even calling her ‘a powerful influence for evil’. Lomax’s other saint translations are Linda Darnell as St Barbara, Kirsten Dunst as St Agnes, and Jennifer Jones (who played the eponymous saint in The Song of Bernadette (1943)) as St Radegund. Although ostensibly playful, these paintings embody a layering of both cultural and psychological signifiers. Without getting bogged down in quasi-religiosity they seem to speak about desire and a deep-seated ‘we are all of us in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars’ need to worship something unattainable, glorious, and miraculous. Lomax’s saints also contain a touch of latent proto-feminist appeal, her young women who have been chopped about, burnt and misogynistically murdered are here stripped of the tortuous garb of their horrific histories, portrayed instead as strong and independent women with often dreamy yet steely gazes.

Jennifer Caroline Campbell, (Satellite) Prancing Deity Offering Bowl, Azure Valley, Eastern Region 2680-2715 CE, paper pulp, acrylic paint, plaster, clay, wire mesh, pendant, sand, neoprene, string, silk clay, diamond shaped rock, photo Adrian Powter  

Cambridge native Jennifer Caroline Campbell was one of the prime movers in getting this exhibition to fruition. In briefly describing her Azzurian Worlds works to me at the exhibtion Campbell stated that ‘fictional seemed like a way to go with Utopian thinking which, for me, was better than the political’. For Campbell, making things with her hands is a way of developing and re-shaping ideas. The hand-painted walls at All Saints Church were the starting points for Azzurian Worlds. Campbell describes the painted walls as ‘wearing a multitude of traces, which embody past human gesture, and form an encasing lattice surround’. Thinking about who had made the work, about the perceived differences between high and domestic craft, about Morris’s longing for a Utopian society led Campbell to invent her own utopian society, Azure Valley, which occurs around the 27th century in an undisclosed isolated location. Her decorative brightly coloured sculptural pieces stand in as artefacts from the Valley which have survived to tell their story. Azure Valley is imagined as a matriarchal society, therefore many of her artefacts are displayed within feminised cup like holders. A particular favourite was a tiny silver horse in a bright blue bowl ‘Ah yes’ she says as I mention it, ‘that symbolises the way horses represent something wild and yet also tamed’. I also ask about the significance of what seem like ornate bishop’s croziers which are placed vertically across the pews. These she describes as a counterbalance to the masculine verticality so redolent in churches. Campbell cites Perkins Gillman’s visionary yet flawed and problematic novel Herland (1915) as partly inspiring her work, along with other texts such as The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892) and Uses of the Erotic by Audre Lorde (1978). Knowing the highly theoretical backstories to Campbell’s works belies the sheer visual enjoyment of the pieces themselves in all their glorious gloopiness and delicacy. Since the ravages of time have not tainted their exuberant colours, Campbell has gloriously put the fabulous into the fantastical!  

Jennifer Caroline Campbell, Staff with Pomegranate Decoration, Azure Valley, Southern Region 2680-2715 CE, paper pulp, acrylic paint, plaster, clay, bamboo, wire, sand, neoprene, string, plastic ring, sea sponge, jasmine tea  

 

Back to Fabulation, other meanings of the word are informed by the writings of Saidiya Hartman who introduced the idea of ‘critical fabulation’, signifying a writing methodology that combines historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative. It also relates to Robert Scholes 1967 novel The Fabulatorswhich has some relationship to science fiction and has been described as taking flight from accepted ‘realistic’ fictional concepts, dislocating time and space and purposely blurring lines between the actual and the artificial.

 

All the artists in this exhibition have in their own way made thoughtful, often startling responses not only to the magnificent church interior but to the very interesting word chosen to corral the overall concept. Within the world of jazz when a musician is deemed to have played or sung something exceptionally well the phrase ‘they just took it to church’ is used, I cite it here as an epitaph for this show.

 

Alex Michon 

 

 

 

Fabulation

Toby Upson, Cathy Lomax, Jennifer Caroline Campbell, Luke Burton

All Saints Church, Cambridge

17 - 31 March 2022

Open Weds to Sunday 12-4pm (until 6pm on Thurs and Fri)