Stuf Thi Ship With Vitayll (All The Warld Aboute) 2019
Commission for Ecstatic Rituals at Humber Street Gallery, Hull. 2019
http://www.humberstreetgallery.co.uk/exhibition/ecstatic-rituals/
The title Stuf Thi Ship With Vitayll (All The Warld Aboute) comes from the Wakefield mystery play of Noah’s Arc. I chose the phrases as they had a carnal quality – stuff, and vitayll – meaning food but also echoing vitality and festivity, and All The Warld Aboute emphasises the wider communities associated with the local fair. The ship is an outward looking symbol remembering our commercial and traditional heritage at a time when our international relationships are under question, and it is a compacted emblem of the ‘tober’ or total atmosphere of the medieval fair.
‘The Children of Mercury’, 2019
Ceramic and mixed media
For ‘Twenty Years’ at Cross Street Arts
With ‘The Children of Mercury’ Anna FC Smith is experimenting with acts of communal remembering. Her practice looks back through history to make sense of the present and who we are as a species. She is drawn to ritual and communality. For Twenty Years she wanted to look at the nature of an anniversary and how people signal significance to milestones in the passage of time and mythologise specific events through actions of memory. She has created a medal for Cross Street Arts, playing on self-made artist medals of the renaissance, drawing in symbolism from the renaissance, 90s culture, heraldry and alchemy to create a performative object that can be walked in a miniature civic procession.
‘This Goodly Frame, The Earth, This Most Excellent Canopy, The Air’ 2019
Commission for The Fire Within. Launch of Wigan’s Cultural Strategy, The Galleries, Wigan.
‘This Goodly Frame, The Earth, This Most Excellent Canopy, The Air’ responds to changes to the town and communal space. Smith has created a town square well, a traditional epicentre around which activities such as commercial transactions and festive rites take place. Her monument describes the elemental substances of the old and new market square, the physical earth which Bakhtin spoke of as a place where boys ran with clay splattered legs and creaking carts of dung rattled by; And the intangible aether, the space of disembodied messages and virtual interaction.
But They Had All Things In Common.2019.
Ceramics and mixed media.
But They Had All Things In Commonis an anti-chronistic processional vehicle playing with the aesthetics of the Arts and Crafts movement and medieval symbolism. The work examines community identity expression through the pageant, linking the political ideal of Ruskin in Unto This Last and “the affection one man owes to another” with the ideas of the medieval guild where there was enshrined fraternal love and “partial suppression of the self in the name of mutual obligation” (Gervase Rosser).
Reason Is An Impasse, Reason Is Damnation
Reason Is An Impasse, Reason Is Damnation is a research project and exhibition by artists Faye Spencer and Anna FC Smith, examining the ancient fool archetype and what he offers a divided society. Using his sceptres as a foundational motif, their collaborative research resulted in an exhibition of mixed media works, using humour, history and popular culture to engage with empathic folk wisdom. They reinvigorated the primal lore of the absurd and initiated a reconciliation with folly.
Touring Hanover Project in Preston and Cross Street Arts in Wigan, the exhibition’s accompanying programme included talks, performances, workshops and a publication.
Hanover Project, Preston. 22nd March - 18th April 2019
Cross Street Arts, Wigan. 3rd May - 1st June 2019
I laghe that I kynke and then salle thou drynk. 2018.
Ceramic, concrete and mixed media water sculpture.
Piece for The Deconstructed Cross.
I have focused on the ceiling bosses and gargoyles of St Wilfrid’s church and explored the history of grotesque characters going back to antiquity, such as the Egyptian god Bes or Hermes carvings used on Etruscan bridges
and boundary stones. The figures are part of an apotropaic tradition where
lewd and vulgar creatures performing humorous antics protect places from evil. I am fascinated by the link between bawdiness and protection, where it is not
purity that is opposed to the malign but crude laughter. The gargoyles in the work are assemblages from parts of the carvings from St Wilfrid’s Church and the trough is reminiscent of the stone sarcophagus in the churchyard
now used as a planter.
Our House of Common Weeds
NewBridge Project, Gateshead. 2018.
The second showing of Our House of Common Weeds.
Verity Birt, Fourthland, Carl Gent, Anna FC Smith, Andrea Williamson
Curated by Nathalie Boobis
Opened 16th Nov 2018.
Round table discussion 17th Nov 2018.
We Fight For The Future of Our Nation
11th - 29th September 2018.
Solo show at Wigan STEAM, Library St, Wigan
In the early 1900s the famous politician Keir Hardie gave a number of speeches in Wigan including at The Royal Court Theatre on King Street. In one of these speeches he stated to the assembled crowd ‘At election time you are citizens but when you strike you are the mob’. In more recent years The Royal Court Theatre became a nightclub playing Old Skool, Hardcore and Dance Anthems, one of the latest to shut on a Friday and Saturday night.
With this history The Royal Court Theatre became a set in which Smith wanted to play out concepts of ‘the mob’. The word has had a resurgence in an age of increased populism and political anger but it has many meanings. According to Elias Canetti mobs are a species of crowds and a living, conscious entity. They are portrayed by those outside of the mob as intoxicated, incoherent, and uncivilised. The mob can have different and overlapping moods be it festive, rebellious or baiting. The word can be used to undermine a group with legitimate goals or benign intentions but can also describe a group which poses a real or perceived threat to authority or to the individual.
Smith and members of the public have created Toby jugs, each is an individual character but together they become a mass, potentially an assembly, a party, a crowd, a revelry or a mob. She worked with artist Dustin Lyon to create a new hardcore track using the words of Hardie’.
‘The Merry Wagtail Jades, The Breeches They Do Carry’ 2018
Mixed media sculpture
Pankhurst in The Park Commission 2018
Eminent Domain at The Former Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Alexandra Arts and Art 511 Mag
Lore and The Living Archive
Dancers process down the streets as a melody repeats like a mantra.
A ghoulish looking costumed horse fights with another in the centre of town.
A hedge of twigs and branches withstands the tide.
Ritual and custom is found in every society, and Doc Rowe has been documenting the traditions of the British Isles since the 1960s, amassing an enviable collection of artefacts, photography, footage and audio currently housed in Whitby. This living archive, growing year on year, is thought to be the largest of its kind and charts the rise, decline and revival of many of our calendar customs.
Lore and the living archive sees three artists respond to this collection through new, original artworks. Photographer, Bryony Bainbridge; printmaker and poet, Natalie Reid, and multimedia artist, Anna FC Smith contemplate what place traditions have in contemporary society and how they influence the communities in which they originate. The artists also consider the role of the archivist and how his presence at some events has become as anticipated and revered as the tradition itself.
To read more about the artists, Doc Rowe and some of the customs represented in the archive, please visit: docrowearchiveandcollection.blogspot.co.uk
Curated by Stephanie West
Marketing and communications Sophie Parkes-Nield
Photos by Seth Tinsley
Delight in Masques and Revels Sometimes Altogether. 2018
Sculpture and procession.
Created as part of a residency with Wigan Libraries called Imago Wigan.
This procession was one of the outcomes of a research project into Wigan Boxing Day. Smith invented a new custom that celebrated the creativity and vibrancy of Wiganers on Boxing Day. The processional sculpture is a folk mummer character incorporating many of the fancy dress costumes worn on Boxing Day in Wigan. Crossing the contemporary custom of boxing day, and more ancient forms of disguise, Anna FC Smith worked with choreographer Ruth Welch to develop dance moves of the entourage which mimick club dancing, drunkenness and folk dance. The figure was processed through town like a rebellious Wigan walking day.
Filmed by Liz Chapman.
Delight in Masques and Revels Sometimes Altogether
Imago residency at Wigan Library. Nov 2017 - April 2018.
Anna FC Smith is researching Wigan’s Boxing Day Fancy Dress custom.
Every year seemingly the entire town of Wigan dons costume and gets drunk. Outfits range in reference from pop culture through to the satirical and the just plain silly. The practice is only about 40 years old, and Anna is using mass call-outs to pinpoint its origins and the variety of costumes worn. Though unrelated in foundation, the tradition mimics ancient forms of Christmas masking and guising to revel and cause mischief unrecognized.
The Bacchae: And In Their Companies Deep Wine-jars Stand, Forever and Anon. 2017
Mixed media sculpture and digital video.
The Bacchae are five singing sculptures, simultaneously ancient wine jars and contemporary disco balls inspired by the specific setting of The Bowling Green pub in Wigan and its regular karaoke nights. Developed with the regular patrons of the night and the pub’s landlady, Nancy Jones, who donated videos they filmed on their phones to the artist. The work posits overlooked spaces of celebration, intoxication and community within our present time as worthy contenders for speculative futures. The videos sit within the open mouths of the character jugs singing karaoke and engaging in jubilant revelry. The jugs are made from bright, glittering fabrics that evoke the costumes of party goers as well as referring to the maenads, female followers of wine cults in Ancient Greece often depicted on pottery, who wore animal skins around their shoulders on the occasion of their ecstatic full-moon ritual gatherings. They are lit by disco lights which cast their light throughout the exhibition and produce an atmosphere synonymous with communal festivity and the Greek concept of kephi - the energy of joy and passion.
These works were developed for the project: Our House of Common Weeds
Res. Enclave 1-3, 50 Resolution Way, London SE8 4AL
Exhibition open 28 October – 25 November 2017, Wed-Sat 12-6pm or by appointment
Friday 27 October 6-9pm preview feat. performance by Alys North + afterparty 9-11pm with DJ set by Bizarro World
Friday 24 November 6-11pm closing event feat. performance by Carl Gent + karaoke with live link-up to The Bowling Green pub in Wigan
Verity Birt (London, UK), Fourthland (London, UK), Carl Gent (London, UK), Anna FC Smith (Wigan, UK), Andrea Williamson (Montreal, Canada).
Curated by Nathalie Boobis
Our House of Common Weeds is a group exhibition curated by Nathalie Boobis for Res. featuring new work by artists Verity Birt, Fourthland, Carl Gent, Anna FC Smith & Andrea Williamson. It is the result of an eighteen month process of collaborative research into knowledge and ideas ravaged in the path of progress but still latent within stories, rituals, our bodies and the landscape. The artworks within Our House of Common Weeds suggest a constellation of other possible futures built with the disenfranchised wisdom from the realms of female, folk and indigenous cultures, prehistory, the ‘irrational’ and the non-human.
The forms of collaboration through which each artist has developed their ideas are directly reflective of the content of the work. Verity Birt’s sound, video and sculptural pieces exploring feminine mythologies, collectivity and prehistoric rock art have been realised through vocal workshops with Newcastle-based women’s choir, SHE, at Lordenshaw Channel and Roughting Lynn, Neolithic sites in Northumberland. Carl Gent’s folkloric well sculpture is the result of long term research into the fictions and mythologies of the Mercian Queen Cynethryth, the Victorian explorer Kate Marsden and conversations with the storytelling duo, Sheaf+Barley. Fourthland’s installation evoking a domestic scenario of matriarchal reign results from workshops with Xenia, an English language and friendship group for migrant women learning English and English-speaking women in Hackney, London. Anna FC Smith’s festive sculpture, video and sound work on the collective potential of communal intoxication, singing and revelry has been developed in collaboration with regular karaoke-goers at The Bowling Green pub in Wigan and its landlady Nancy Jones. Andrea Williamson’s large scale watercolour and pencil dreamscapes are developed in collaboration with the public archive of Canadian endangered species and the online dream-sharing community, r/Dreams.
The works in the exhibition bear traces of lived experience that the artists have identified as potent ingredients for other possible futures. Our House of Common Weeds proposes the aesthetic experience of the artworks as a set of tools for activating disenfranchised knowledge and interrupting the singular version of the future that is currently unfolding.
A limited edition zine featuring aspects of the research process, an essay by the curator and contributions by each of the exhibiting artists will be available to buy from Res. at the opening and throughout the duration of the exhibition.
Nasty Women Wigan. Cross Street Arts 11th Aug - 2nd Sept 2017
Team: Anna FC Smith, Paula Fenwick Lucas, Amy Cecilia Leigh, Lucy Sharkey, Jane Fairhurst, Emily Calland, Wendy Bowers, plus additional support from Cross Street Arts: Martyn Lucas and Steven Heaton
Exhibiting artists: Lo Green Olivia Brazier Jane Fairhurst Jo Barcas Buchan Ffion Pritchard Elaine Phipps Rosalind Barker Claire Doyle Alice Watkins Vanessa Alves Ellen Moss Hazel Roberts Gaenor Deacon Maryamsadat Amirvaghefi Maria Walker Anna FC Smith Paula Fenwick Lucas Lucy Sharkey Amy Cecilia Leigh Jacqui Priestley Rachael Finney Ellie Barrett Jenny Drinkwater Sally Barker Emily Calland (Eat Your Kids Illustration) Emily Ashcroft Helena Denholm Lois Hopwood Wendy Boyers
Photos by Michael Orrell Photography