65-67 Peckham Road
London SE5 8UH
Thursday March 31 2016
With Jo and Mary away doing
their holiday grandmotherly thing , Linda was not going to venture far
from home so a bus to Peckham and a short walk brought her to the South London Gallery
– it is next to the somewhat overwhelmingly concrete Camberwell Art
College but in a classic Victorian public building – Passmore Edwardes
no less – and has in fact been a free gallery since 1891. The inside is
all you might expect from the outside: high ceilings, big windows and plenty of
terrazzo floor tiles. I really missed having a partner in crime as I managed to
drop all my leaflets and pen very early in the visit so this is largely based
on memory and said leaflets. Given the traffic and pollution on Peckham Road
the Gallery is beautifully quiet and secluded with a garden café at the front
and back and a very tempting book shop.
The contrast between a traditionally built 19th
Century gallery with light from above and modern exhibits is most enjoyable.
The gallery has a quite fast-changing programme of showcasing different artists
and different types of art, and the two I caught today are not around for long.
The smaller Clore Gallery showed the work of Jamaican
cartoonist (1949-1999) Wilfred Limonious
from a large rural Jamaican family who worked exclusively in
Jamaica, firstly for ‘The Star’ newspaper with both single and strip cartoons.
Then in the Seventies he was asked by the government to help increase literacy
(which was poor amongst men in particular) via the JAMAL programme. And thirdly
he helped promote the dancehall scene through cartoons, posters and album
sleeves – these are obviously the most colourful works as well as being where
he started to use local Jamaican patois rather than more received English. I
felt I needed a ‘voiceover’ to help me get some of the jokes. This exhibition
has obviously been well advertised and seemed very popular, and not just with
the rainbow-haired art students (how obvious is that?).
In the main historic gallery the second exhibition took some
finding – the usual entrance was blocked by one of the exhibits and you needed
to enter, by the back door so to speak, into a brilliantly white room almost
dazzling in today’s sunshine. The room was generously stickered with little labels with different plays on the
word ‘shore’ and to me the works conjured up driftwood and tide debris – articles
welded/bent/ formed into different sculptures, some almost figurative, some
less so. Michael Dean, the artist, also writes and there was a pile of books
but as they were under a stone and adjacent to a work it did not seem right to
move one? He has exhibited widely and
his works are both intriguing and striking, and doubtless make more sense if
you can hear his words read too.
I thoroughly recommend this gallery – easily accessible in
South London but as worth the trip as that other, very different gallery in
Dulwich.
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