JOURNEY
Out of Africa we came. Human in our frailty. Over the long millennia we walked north, west and east. Our long walk out of Eden, out of Afru-ika, the Mother Continent, took place over a timescale so long that savannahs became deserts, deserts burst into flower, seas dried up and reformed. Life seethed in the roiling oceans and rivers. At the core of our innermost being, our psyche, our human soul, we carried our universal desire to journey, to move forward. To know, to think, to seek and to find. We are adventurers still. Yearning for the next field, the next hill top, the next golden planet, the next world of water and the next valley with a river, where we can build a city. Some stopped by the way to farm, to grow maize, to grow spelt, to grow squash. Others loped liked jackals or wolves across the landscape, trotting their energy efficient hunter gatherer not quite run. Jogging the old straight tracks, they wore the land down in strips that exist even now as hollow ways and linear footpaths across the wilderness. We still have their imprint. The land is a palimpsest. Those feet, those boots in ancient times, did tread the moors and mires, bringing, like the Amesbury Archer, their gold, their bows, their flint arrowheads, their bronze artefacts and faience bead decorations.
In time, a tiny phrase that carries a heavy load, we built cities and towns, loci where the locus pocus, the trickster magic of organised communal living could grow and grow and grow and grow, seemingly without end. With their carved symbols – Gate, God, Bull, Man Sky, Night, little did the builders of old Göbekli Tepe, 10,000 years ago, know that they were creating the embryonic precursors to every city on Earth since then. From Teotihuacán to Tashkent, Tokyo to Damascus, modern humans have terraformed the land, extracted minerals for brick and concrete. Felled forests for timber, worked wood and stone, mined for coal and dammed the waters. Building dwellings, places of work and communities for the people who make the infrastructure work.
As birds wheeled and called above, modern humans travelled many thousands of miles in this manner. Migrants both, birds sweeping through the spaces between us on their annual, lines of power guided, unseen magnetic, pole star navigations, while our frail and fallible humans slowly trod the never before stepped on soil of continental Europe. A watery land on the edge of the cold, whale blue seas.
However, all of this happened as time slipped, Venus rose and fell, the lunar cycle too and seas evaporated and rose again. We should remember that all our achievements, everything we have ever built, invented, blasted, burnt and plasticised, has occupied less than the equivalent of a single second on the interminable tick of the geological clock. Tick, tock. Tik Tok. Gone. All our plutonium clocked Voyagers in the absolute zero vacuum of interstellar space, are of no more weight, mass or importance in the context of Deep Time, than the nanosecond existence of exotic quantum particles, Quarks, Gluons, Bosons and Neutrinos.
This, my friends, is where we are standing now. At this three way crossroads, this liminal edge, this river bank above the flowing waters of time, in this exhibition, this manifest for Ian Pearsall’s personal journey as an artist, collaborator and creative force.
So, we come to the crux of this multimedia show. Journey. What is it about? Ian Pearsall’s work is about time, or, for that matter, Time. Time and, for now, three locations. The Six Towns of the Potteries. Blue black brick and hardy people. The blue remembered bricks of his ancestors’ and his home town. A place of industrial fire. A place whose soul was forged in the fires of a thousand single brick thick bottle kilns. Its identity forged in flames and slip and the nimble fingers of the world’s most skilful paintresses and master potters. Carbon black, soot stained back streets and colossal Victorian buildings. Smoky, sulphur scented Stoke on Trent. Grim eyed furnace men, knocking off shift, maybe their last shift at work. Angels with dirty faces and fingers, returning from work in a deep, dark river of thought. Absorbed by their labour, the sweat of their brow. Dreaming of open spaces and gardens, Biddulph Moor, Trentham Gardens, Wakes Week and a train ride to Rhyl. Time running through the six towns like the soon to be rejuvenated, newly biodiversified River Trent. From filth to fresh water, coal tip phenols to trout. A love letter to Stoke on Trent. Its own Trent Mask Replica.
Second subject. Africa, hot, bright, full of life. Ian Pearsall grew up in Malawi and this part of the exhibition showcases his collaboration with John Medupe ( Twitter: @KlashaMusic), who is a music producer. A curator of Malawian traditional and new music acts, John has produced five compilation albums titled Rare Malawi Volumes 1 to 5. Ian is also collaborating with Ceesay and Sarjo from Gambia. “Ceesay makes wonderful videos for me of street scenes in Gambia. People just going about their everyday business. Sarjo provided a refreshing viewpoint. I commissioned photos. He sent pictures of markets, beach fishermen. His photographs are full of atmosphere, colourful textiles. The women wearing highly ornamental cloths of blue and gold, red, black and white. The men wore cast off Western clothes which they called ‘dead mans’ clothes. Sarjo’s photos help me to recall the sights, sounds and smell of Africa. The piles of exotic vegetables and fruit. The bowls of dried locusts. The people would catch locusts, those large flying insects, in scoop nets as they flew around street lights. The locusts would be dried in the sun and served with a thick porridge made from maize.’
Third subject: Landscape. A move to the countryside of North West Staffordshire, provided confirmation of Ian’s focus on story and the passing of time. In this case the seasons and in a micro sense, the changes in light from hour to hour, day to day. These paintings show his eye for intriguing sight lines coupled to the dynamic light & shade that reveals the contours of this landscape of low hills, richly corrugated ploughed fields and isolated buildings.
First they came for the water, then they came for the coal and then the clay. Industry was born on the banks of the rivers Severn and Trent. The journey which led to The Black Streets, Lines On The Land and A Different Light, will be inscribed in the Akashic Record This, my friends, is where we are standing now. At this three way crossroads, this liminal edge, this river bank above the flowing waters of time. In this exhibition, this manifest for Ian Pearsall’s personal journey as an artist, collaborator, creative force and flȃneur extraordinaire. This is his Journey, This is Ian Pearsall.
Author: Reginald Crawford Twitter: @regcrawford3
END
'Journey'
at The Soden Collection in Shrewsbury.
OPENS Saturday 23rd July until Saturday 13th August
https://sodencollection.com/
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