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Hanging rods

Hanging rods

Tonico Lemos Auad exhibition

Long thin sculptures hang from the ceiling to greet the visitor in the first room of the Tonico Lemos Auad exhibition in the De La Warr Pavilion. These rods, echoing the columns in the gallery, are made from cream and red linen. On one, some threads are pulled and crocheted; on another a seahorse shape is picked out. Roz Cran writes about this fascinating exhibition.

The second room of the exhibition contains large blocks of sea chalk placed at intervals on the floor. Each is named with the first line plus another line from a poem by the Chilean Poet, Pablo Neruda: ‘In the wave-strike over unquiet stones/Merged you and I, Seal the Silence’ and ‘In the wave-strike over unquiet stones/Perpetual Sand’. If you look very carefully, you will discover miniscule gold letters tapped into the chalk lumps: a single letter or a line from the poem. On one rock is a bottle filled with sand. I ask the gallery assistant about it and she says it contains the whole poem. A couple of black linen canvases hang on the walls, sea and sail shapes picked out, the light shining through.

Growing beds

Growing beds

The next room contains a set of stepped wooden growing beds, filled with medicinal plants. I identify yew, bay, lemon balm. There is a shelf of books about apothecary plants and gardening. A flyer invites people to bring plants to exchange each Saturday afternoon of the show. A site for conversations and swaps. An arty allotment. A number of Saturday talks have taken place too by people who worked with Derek Jarman on his beach garden in Dungeness and by some specialists in medicinal plants.

On the floor of the final room, empty tin and drink cans are arranged in groups. These have been sandblasted to their original grey metal colour apart from a tomato, a strawberry, or a palm tree – the parts that picture something from the natural world. One group features trees, another fruits. Tins from around the world, from consumer culture, now form small copses, a set of villages.

Tonico Lemos Auad is a Brazilian artist who trained as an architect in Brazil, but always knew he wanted to be an artist. He chose to study art at Goldsmiths College, London and is now based in London. He uses a wide range of materials to make sculptures – and is interested in change and erosion, myth and chance, climate change and wellbeing. He often responds to a site and in this case, he has been inspired by the sea outside the Pavilion and the history of Bexhill as a health spa, a place where people came to breathe in the ozone and bathe in the waters.

Tins

Tins

His response is playful and poetic. Using his fellow South American’s poem, he encourages the viewer to relax, to look with care at the chalk rocks and find the uplifting words from Neruda. The atmosphere is airy and free. You think of people strolling along the prom; of sailors patiently carving whalebones and fishermen stringing nets. He has created a place for conversation, for exchanging plants to support health – and he links us to the outside world: to the seaside town, to other places through the tin cans – I recognize some of the images on the tins – a tomato, a strawberry – but others are foreign to me: the palm tree, strange shaped tins, each small group gathered round a tin with a red flame on it, but all part of the wider world.

Auad employs a thoughtful approach to making, using many simple materials and craft techniques to make us think about connections and change, about how some things endure, some things travel and develop. About how we pass the time and how we look after ourselves.

At first, I feel bemused by the number of different displays. The growing beds remind me of the show by Abraham Cruzvillegas: ‘Empty Lot’ in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern presently. I prefer these planters: smaller, simpler, more straightforward – about plants and health. I have to work hard, to spend time considering and wandering from room to room in order to allow myself to make connections between the many elements. I stop and think. I stare out of the window over the green lawn towards the beach. I remember Cornelia Parker’s ‘Edge of England’, pieces of chalk strung up echoing the line of the white cliffs. This show pushes us beyond the border, over the sea and further.

I walk out of the white Modernist Pavilion on to the Promenade and watch the sea for a few minutes, eternally pushing in and pulling out, constantly moving the pebbles on the beach into new patterns.

Tonico Lemos Auad: Exhibiting til 10 April 2016 at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill.

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Posted 07:47 Monday, Apr 4, 2016 In: Visual Arts

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