The Collins Gallery
The University of Strathclyde
Glasgow
Until 12 November
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| ‘Ribbed’, 2001 (detail) Photograph © Giles Sutherland |
This unusual exhibition brings together the work of four artists from the same extended family: Margaret Mellis, Telfer Stokes, Ann Stokes and Charlotte Mellis. The aim of this brief introductory essay is not to assert the influence of one of the artists upon another nor to discuss complex familial relationships. Its purpose is, rather, to serve as a brief introduction to the work of each artist and, where relevant, to introduce the idea of a commonality of interest and perception.
Margaret Mellis (1914-2009) mother of Telfer Stokes (b.1940) , sister of Ann Stokes (nee Mellis) (b. 1922) and aunt of Charlotte Mellis (b. 1952) was married to the prominent critic, painter and poet Adrian Stokes (1902-1972) between the years 1938 and 1947.
From an art historical and critical perspective it important to consider, at least momentarily, the effect of the marriage on Margaret Mellis’s work, the development of her career and the evolution of a personal artistic vision.
Stokes and Mellis lived in Carbis Bay, near St Ives, at Parc Little Owles, Stokes’s house, between 1939 and 1946 in an artistic milieu, described by one observer like ‘fighting ferrets in a bag”. The community included the households of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, as well as Naum Gabo. Ann visited Carbis Bay in 1940 to assist with the birth of Telfer, Margaret’s son.
According to the prevalent social mores it is clear that Adrian Stokes expected his wife to adopt the more traditional roles assigned to women at the time, including house-keeping and child-rearing. Although a highly trained artist with a rigorous academic training firstly at Edinburgh College of Art under the tutelage of S.J. Peploe, and others – and later at Euston Road School, London, her work as an artist was expected to assume second place.
During the St Ives years Mellis worked in an idiom which was described somewhat whimsically as ‘Scottish Constructivist’. This included exquisite pieces such as the card and wood collage ‘Transparent Construction’ (1941), and the two fist-sized marble sculptures, ‘Divided Forms’ and ‘Two Forms’ (both 1943-4). Although emotionally mature, beautifully conceived, delicate yet strong – such original and poetic works were considered derivative, especially in respect of Nicholson and Gabo. It was a categorisation and judgement which attached unfairly and unjustifiably to a number of talented female artists of Mellis’s generation, not least her contemporary and friend, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004).
The score or so of works by Margaret Mellis selected for this Collins Gallery exhibition span, approximately, the last four decades of the artist’s working life. The exemplary selection includes ‘Landscape (Violet and Blue)’ (1962); ‘Interlocked Forms (Red, blue, purple, orange, yellow, white) (1964)1 and ‘Over the Moon’ (1975). All of these explore Mellis’s continuing fascination with abstraction which is, nevertheless, anchored in the observed world. The last is an example of one of Mellis’s many forays into what was then ‘new’ aesthetic territory where she paints on the ‘raw’ surface of an unprimed and unstretched canvas while also subverting the convention of the sixteen-square grid by overpainting with quasi-geometrical form in a muted palette of greys, browns and whites.
Also here are examples of Mellis’s envelope drawings where, for example, the form of the composition of ‘Margot’s Red Lilies’ (1989) is dictated by the shape of a deconstructed envelope which acts as a framing device. The composition, in turn, points to the unusual shape of the surface derived from an everyday object.
However, it is for her ingenious and extraordinary driftwood constructions that Mellis will be best remembered. These began tentatively at first, following her move, in 1976, to Southwold on the Suffolk coast to a house she shared with her second husband – the artist, Francis Davison (1919-1984). A number of commentators including Mel Gooding, Julian Spalding and Andrew Lambirth have written perspicaciously on this aspect of Mellis’s oeuvre. However, it seems clear that these assemblages, partially sculptural and partly concerned with paint and colour, owe their genesis to Mellis’s coastal years in St Ives, nearly four decades before.
These works, composed mainly of fragments from discarded boats and other structures found in or near the sea, are often characterised by the type of paint and colours used in a hostile marine environment – i.e. bright, colours in tough durable paint. Often such works repay careful consideration, and should be observed not only as a totality, but also in detail.
For example, careful focus on ‘Ribbed’ (2001) reveals a complex arrangement of colour, tone, material, texture and surface which reveals aspects of its construction, including a structural plywood backing-plate and the characteristic brass screws, hidden in earlier works, but now revealed as an essential part of the narrative of process and construction. It is quite astonishing to realise that this work, one of Mellis’s last, was made when the artist was eighty-seven years of age.
It seems fitting, that in Mellis’s absence – which defines a great and lasting loss – that some space should be given over to the artist in her own words. Here, in a passage quoted in a number of publications, she describes the genesis of an earlier work, ‘Bogman’ (1990) but which in many respects – such as scale, method of construction and material – is a companion-piece to the later work:
I found a boat skeleton in the marsh. It was half under water, but not rotted. The dark blue paint was cracked and curling off it. My friend carried it back to my house.
I laid it down on the studio floor. It was nearly too good to do anything with, but not quite, because almost without touching them bits of wood came out of my wood pile and lay down on the broken bones, leaving little gaps and splits of different shapes and sizes. They tilted slightly at different angles. I kept going to see what was happening when I was supposed to be doing something else. Two or three hours disappeared in two or three minutes every day for several months. But while it lay on the floor it got kicked out of shape at least twenty times. Particularly by my photographer who put her stand on its chest and kicked its side out of the camera’s way. I quickly put the pieces back but by the end of that session it had been put out of shape at least eight times.
….I went to my studio and worked at top speed for 5 ? hours without stopping. I screwed everything into place. By then I knew exactly where each bit needed to go. There was no choice, but they had to be fixed at once. They couldn’t wait another minute.
When at last I could see it (you can’t look properly on the floor), I got quite a surprise to see that I had a kind of man there. Later I realised he was a Bog Man. His head and feet had been partially burnt and some of his bones broken. He might have been impaled on a plank which had become part of his body. Are those his feet which don’t touch the ground, but seem to hang on either side of what started as his body and which is burnt at the bottom?
This piece works by the left-out shapes, the splits and gasp left by the wood which doesn’t join and the angles at which the pieces of wood lie. The colour is equally important. I haven’t painted any of it.
I had no idea he would be a Bog Man when I started. (2)
In her given title for the work (given long after the work had been made) Mellis was obviously suggesting a specific link with a specific set of ideas, events or references. She may have been referring to the sacrificial bog victims found in Jutland in the 1950s as described by Seamus Heaney in his poem ‘Grauballe Man’: …The grain of his wrists/ is like bog oak,/ the ball of his heel/ like a basalt egg./ His instep has shrunk/ cold as a swan’s foot/ or a wet swamp root…3
Alternatively they reference may be to an object such as that of the Iron Age oak figure found buried in Ballachulish Moss in 1880. (4)
Given the fact that this is so clearly a family exhibition – in a number of significant respects –
there can be no omission of the rather poignant ‘Mother and Son’ (1993). The drift-wood relief is significant in a number of ways, not least its possible autobiographical ascription, an idea supported by other figurative pieces in Mellis’s oeuvre such as ‘Resurrection’ (1985), ‘Temptation’ (1986) and ‘Evening Walk’ (1986) all of which refer at least in some way to Mellis’s outlook following the death of Davison. The work itself shows a mother figure standing protectively next to her offspring.
It is only in recent years that Telfer Stokes has acknowledged the significant debt he owes to his parents in his own artistic development. Telfer Stokes has had a number of almost discrete artistic careers. Firstly in the early 60s he worked in New York while as a postgraduate Beckmann Fellow at Brooklyn Museum Art School. Here, he came under the influence of the American abstract expressionists. Discussing that period in his life Telfer Stokes comments:
…that was formative and at a moment in history too – the Cuban Missile Crisis ...... and Barnet Newman walked into the loft space I had on the Lower East Side, befriended me and encouraged me subsequently to keep doing what I was doing .... it’s a long story but he was a very important influence on me, especially his sculpture. Also Duchamp was someone at that time, I met briefly, significantly or not.(5)
Later, back in England, Telfer Stokes worked with text and constructed relief which culminated in what he considers to be a ‘disastrous’ show in 1972 at the Serpentine Gallery in London. From here Telfer Stokes moved into the medium of the artist book which allowed great conceptual freedom and allowed him to subvert convention and confound analysis. In texts such as ‘Back to Back’ (1980)and ‘Clinkscale’ (1977) he demonstrated creativity, inventiveness and freedom.
Discussing the diversity of his output, Stokes comments:
…I'm aware that the moves I have made in my practice don’t look as if they add up and there is an element of oscillation between extremes where thinking things like putting a book together conflicts with making things out of scrap which is much more instinctive and physical.
However these are the extremes – possibly I find it very difficult to combine them but making and thinking do play their parts together, like the titling of the sculpture comes from a more cerebral part of me.
I consult my note book when I'm looking for a title and writing in the note book is often the result of thinking or hearing something or reading something .... and I did try and make books in the most bizarre way where the set-up left leeway for the development of the book on the printing press itself.
However, in retrospective but not altogether serious analysis Telfer Stokes comments that
…what I was doing making books for 30 years was saying I'm not interested in my mother’s work etc. etc. - I don’t want to be connected - & yet all along the person whom I had admired was the same person as she admired - Alfred Wallis. And what a disaster is that !
Despite the whimsicality of such remarks concerning Alfred Wallis – the self-taught “naïve” artist who obsessively painted life in and around the St Ives harbour in a ‘flat’, non-perspectival style with a particular blue-grey palette – it is clear that he is admired by Telfer Stokes and that, inevitably, Wallis had an effect on Margaret also. Perhaps this was about work which thrived in proximity to the sea and gained its effect by the juxtaposition of texture, colour and shape? All of these aspects certainly inform Margaret Mellis’s work and they can be seen, too, in the new body of work Telfer Stokes has produced for the current exhibition.
Such pieces, often large, heavy, bold, muscular and masculine are titled by Telfer Stokes in a way which suggests cerebrality, thought and discourse. Titles such as ‘Chufter’, ‘Meme’, ‘Accidence’ and ‘Darkling’ are at once literary, discomfiting and enigmatic – and they form a kind of found poetry in themselves when mouthed and spoken. Telfer Stokes is uncharacteristically coy about their origins citing music as the likely source.
Handling these works in preparation for hanging and display emphasises their distance from delicate and precious art objects which are handled with white gloves. The solidity, grime and weight of these pieces – great slabs, beams and plates of steel cut with angle grinder and reassembled in rhythmic juxtapositions of colour and mass.
There is something joyful, unpretentious and weighty about these pieces – almost as far away as it is possible to get from the bookishness of Telfer Stokes’s previous artistic incarnation. And yet there is a connection:
I have come to make sculptural objects as a natural development from making visual books. The kind of freedom that I had going out with the camera and shooting for a book has been transferred to a visit with a trailer to the scrap yard. My material now is something more physically tangible – the need to transform the base material into something cohesive/whole, remains the same. I do not see my work coming from a sculptural tradition, although what I have made are three dimensional objects. I associate myself with an activity that brings material together: material with a history that has caught my eye because it has the potential to be transformed. (6)
As with Margaret Mellis’s work, these vastly different forms repay careful observation. Although the juxtapositioning of certain elements is clearly intuitive, the way in which this positioning is achieved is clearly not. In ‘Meme’, for example, four separate elements have been combined: a yellow rectangle, a blue-black bar, a rusted hexagon and an L-shaped patch of red. These elements are not merely placed adjacent to each other and welded together. A negative space for the L-shape has been created on the yellow rectangle, so that the L-shape is inserted; the same process applies to the hexagon which also serves as an articulation for the blue-black bar. In other words these pieces have not only been thought about in compositional terms, they have also been considered on a constructed level, serving well to illustrate his father, Adrian Stokes’s belief that the starting point for art was the material and that the viewer, when considering it, would summon textural, tactile and emotional memory.
Looking at Telfer Stokes work en masse it is clear that his interest in texture, pattern, relief, beginning and ending runs through it. In another of Telfer Stokes’s artist books, ‘The Song of the Thrush’, in which a continuous text joins disparate visual elements, the end-pages depict corrugated iron shacks and it is to this subject, either by design or happenstance, that Telfer’s cousin, Charlotte Mellis turns in a remarkable grouping of work on this visual trope.
In 1983, when South Africa was still under the cruel grip of apartheid, I visited Alexandra Township in Johannesburg. The images, sights, smells and emotions from that short visit in July of that year are permanently etched on my memory. These were released in a jumbled torrent as I began, recently, to look carefully at Charlotte Mellis’s unusual and memorable ceramics and pointed the way to another pressing, long-pondered question on the relationship between art and politics.
These discussions have been conducted loudly and frequently in the history of art – one need only think of the graphic war images of Goya to see that the Spanish artist felt that art’s purpose was a broadly political one. The debate which raged within the Surrealist movement as to the relationship between art and a radical left-wing reformist agenda is also illustration of this argument. The list of politico-aesthetic movements and individual agendas is long and mere citation here is not the purpose of this text.
But all of this is relevant in considering Charlotte Mellis’s ceramics derived from a series of trips to around the world where she was exposed to extreme poverty. A highly developed example of a mature response to more youthful experience is seen in a work such as ‘Shantytown’ (2010) which consists of fifty-eight individual ceramic pieces with each component building measuring 16 x 18 x 15 cm. Clearly a work which has taken a great deal of time and care to create, it represents both a political and aesthetic statement.
It is no surprise then to hear that Charlotte Mellis cites the US photographer of the Great Depression, Walker Evans as a major influence. In his work Walker Evans (1903-1975) combined social consciousness, aesthetic statement and political force. Such apparently incompatible aspects are, in fact, a mainstay of good photo-journalism to this day. A moving picture of poverty, an atrocity or famine must, in order to be effective, have a good compositional element to carry forward its full impact. Discussing her work Charlotte Mellis comments :
….the aim is to express ideas in concrete form, try to get a message across which might be a thought or a feeling or atmosphere and sometimes to communicate the ironies of endurance, the triumph (humour) of the human race over adversity. The purpose is more difficult to answer – when I make a bowl it is obvious… but a corrugated shed? Well…does it make you think? What does it make you think? It’s up to you.
The images of Walker Evans appeal to me emotionally; he is speaking to one directly about the plight of these people. There is an atmosphere around the ‘shacks’ and a stark loneliness, an emptiness. I seem to be drawn to the underbelly of life which I cannot exactly explain. I set off across the world with a pack on my back and was exposed to extreme poverty. This helped me develop social awareness. Colour is the upside of the belly.…Certain colours lift the mood. (7)
At Harrogate College of Art where Charlotte Mellis trained under Tim Proud and Dennis Farrell, she was greatly encouraged by a succession of visiting lecturers and external examiners such as Mike Dodd. She was impressed too by the hand-building and abstraction of Gordon Baldwin, an influence which persists until the present in respect of the construction techniques employed in her current work.
Charlotte Mellis expresses an early and enduring fascination with corrugations citing its repetitive pattern, its colour of red oxide and its “crumbling rusty deliciousness” as factors in its attraction. She also relates an anecdote which goes further towards a deeper explanation:
There used to be a collage by Francis Davison…. which hung by the front door of the house in Church Row and it was very stark, just some cut up pieces of cardboard placed in an abstract way. I was attracted to it – it seemed very unassuming and no one else seemed to notice it but because it was always there by the front door I saw it every time I came in or out. I was fascinated by its sheer humbleness.(8)
Charlotte Mellis, after extensive travel but no real direction, was taken under the wing of her aunt, Ann Stokes, who taught her how to be an effective potter, giving her the grounding which enabled her to move on to art college. Ann Stokes, largely self-taught, is a formidable talent in her own right. At first glance, some of her more outrageous pieces such as birds in flight or illuminated crocodiles may seem twee or contrived. But Ann Stokes’s work grows in stature and appeal the more it is considered. Her plates, in particular, are collectors’ items, prized just as much for their visual appeal as for their functionality.
Many of Ann Stokes’s works have a domestic purpose and origin which demonstrate her ability to run a household while maintaining the largely private and modest aspirations of the domestic studio potter. However, Ann Stokes has robustly resisted categorisation. For her, the earthenware vessels which she makes, with no regard for fashion or tradition, are objects to be painted and enjoyed – “painting is what I pot for,” she has said. Her mirrors, flights of fancy decorated with goats, or birds or fish are to be enjoyed and relished….like the life that Ann Stokes so evidently holds dear.
Like Matisse, Picasso and Asger Jorn before her – and to whom she must, one hopes, acknowledge some kind of debt of gratitude – her painted plates of birds, fish and other creatures excite and delight.
Rejected by both the ceramic and painting ‘camps’ Ann Stokes work was largely ignored by the mainstream but was collected by some discerning critic and admirers such as Lord Gowrie and Tanya Harrod, amongst others. Such fondness and admiration led, in turn, to the rather unexpected inclusion of a selection of Ann Stokes’s plates in the 1985 Hayward Annual exhibition ‘A Journey Through Contemporary Art with Nigel Greenwood’.9 Writing about Ann Stokes, Greenwood commented: “Elsewhere I may have voiced certain problems I have with craft when it is elevated to an art form, but with Ann Stokes’s work I have no problems – she has a true artist’s affinity with everything she touches.”10
A recent publication, edited by Tanya Harrod, has asserted Ann Stokes’s place, alongside her other family members, as an artist of stature and interest.11 It is difficult to disagree with such a position, although, as with opinions about any artist, there will be dissenting voices.
In conclusion, this exhibition presents the ideal opportunity to assess, by means of judicicous selection, the many cross-currents, affinities, sympathies and divergences relating to the work of each artist. Such diverse talent is surely a cause for celebration as well as reflection.
GILES SUTHERLAND
September, 2011
1 The colour ascriptions are written by Mellis as part of each work’s title on the reverse of the paintings
2 Quoted in Margaret Mellis, Andrew Lambirth, (2010), p. 161 – but originally from a catalogue of Mellis’s exhibition at the Redfern Gallery, London in 1990
3 ‘Grauballe Man’ North, Faber & Faber, London, 1975
4 Such finds were and are relatively common in Europe and were the subject of an exhibition in Silkeborg, Denmark
5 Telfer Stokes. Interview with Giles Sutherland (via email) 21-22 September, 2011
6 Telfer Stokes, ‘Wall Pieces’ (Artist’s Statement), North House Gallery, Essex, 17 April – 15 May, 2010
7 Charlotte Mellis Interview with Giles Sutherland (via email) 20 September, 2011
8 ibid.
9 Nigel Greenwood (1941-2004) was an art dealer and commentator on the visual arts
10 Quoted in Ann Stokes – Artists’ Potter, ed. Tanya Harrod, p. 123
11 Ann Stokes – Artists’ Potter, ed. Tanya Harrod, London (Lund Humphries), 2009
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