‘Bestial Delights’, insights into curating a joint show

Rachel Williams and Jude Montague open their two week show Bestial Delights at Electro Studios Project Space. Jude Montague reports and gives an insight on what it is like to put on an independent show at the project space.

Rachel and I have worked together before, in fact this is our second joint show at the Electro Studios Project Space. The first was two years ago, in the summertime, and we used the theme of museum and votive offerings to combine our works in one exhibition.

This time we struggled to find a title together but came up with one that emphasised the animal energies in our work. We often work with bestial symbolism, but ironically my own recent work included no obvious creatures but instead was foregrounding human representations. Shadows, wraiths, dark brooding people are seen appearing against cinematically wide backgrounds, embodying psychic forces.

Rachel’s work this show seems if anything more solid and grounded. Her cow-like metal masks made from car parts are bold and rooted. I notice her experimental development of process, combining processes. I am impressed by her work on blanket, in particular a piece which uses embroidery in a way I have not seen previously, as it moves across the cloth in a very unfabric-way, more resonant of ink works. She tells me it was created by projecting a small sketch and following those lines with thread.

There is much experiment in process in this show. I have been pursuing the use of viscosity oils in this show, inspired by the etchings of Stanley William Hayter, the British painter and master printmaker who founded Atelier 17 in Paris. My former tutor, Jean Lodge, was a pupil of his and so I was introduced to his work early in my printmaking life. However, sometimes things take time to evolve and it is only this year that I have really taken on this long-term ambition to find my own way of working with viscosity. What it is, in simple terms, is working with different thicknesses of oil-based inks. It’s a hard technique to do in a shared workshop as the thinner inks run sometimes uncontrollably beneath the pressure of being rolled and this can mean that blankets are in danger of getting spoiled. This is not appropriate for a communal workshop where you have to take care to maintain cleanliness on all the shared equipment.

We coincidentally had both booked Electro Studios Project Space for a week each, running back to back, so we decided to keep them both for our shared exhibition. This means that visitors have two weekends to see the show, but our own lives have (almost) got in the way of the exhibition. Rachel moved house in the middle of her preparations. My friend Caroline Gregory curated the ambitious exhibition Extraordinary Odyssey the week before in which I was a participating artist and it was a hard juggle to make sure everything got enough attention.

In the end, with the help of friends and family, we managed to curate and hang an effective show. I would urge any artist who wants to make the most of their work to take on a solo or a joint show seriously as it is always worth it.

It’s not easy to balance your work when there are two artists taking part. As Rachel says, it’s important to be kind to each other and allow their ideas space, and if there are strong opinions about how work should be displayed, they need to be treated with respect. It is important not to force your own approach forward at the expense of your collaborator.

Rachel has designed a book to accompany the show, with a foreword by curator Jenny Pollitt, also called BESTIAL DELIGHTS.

BESTIAL DELIGHTS

Rachel Williams and Jude Montague

Electro Studios Project Space

Open 12-4pm, Friday-Sunday, 8-10 August

Also in: Visual Arts