02/03/2023
Andrew Purvis’ opening speech for BILGE, 24.02.23
“What’s the point of a Bilge?”
Jaqueline Barmentloo relays this question for us in vivid neon strip from that vast bilge of human thought – The Internet.
The bilge is the lowest compartment of a ship or boat, a place where all odd fluids and unaccounted matter accumulates. Everything that doesn’t wash over the sides congregates here.
Look closely at Sue Lorraine’s “Dip Stick”, there’s a list there, almost imperceptible, of all the assorted substances you might find in a bilge: sea water, sulphites, alcohol, lead, detergent, oil, urine, salt, bleach, blood, grease, bacteria, mercury, fatty acid, solvent.
There is an association with the unlovely, the fetid, with vast plumes of pollutant purged into virgin waters. But these assumptions are challenged in this show – the potency of these reviled fluids is celebrated. Like Andreas Serrano’s infamous “Piss Christ”, Narelle Autio forces us to look at a ruinous flood, just as Lauren Simeoni’s “Ebb & Flow” series transforms menstrual products into oversized jewelry.
There is an alchemical power in the bilge – a sense that these substances coalesce into something transformative. Michael Kutschbach’s “fuliguline” imagines the bubbling seethe beneath the bilge line, as paint disperses into water and melted pewter roils in the pan. The Mulloway Studio’s “Bilge Samples” takes polluted waters gathered from the local river basin, presenting them as alembic distillations, strange sediments filled with fertilizer run-off accumulating at their base.This detritus, the rich and strange effluent of life is prime material for art. I’m reminded of a passage from Melville’s “Moby Dick” where Ishmael encounters a painting – “a boggy, soggy, squitchy picture” in which a “long, limber pretentious black mass” floats “in a nameless yeast”.
Critics have theorised that Turner’s whaling paintings were influenced by Melville – where oozy whale fat was mixed into the paint. The work itself renders blubber into a new creation.
The bilge itself is imagined as a fecund space – giving birth to teeming new life. The bilge rats in Danica McLean’s work evoke the ship bound pests, breeding and cannibalising themselves in the mire. Similarly, the “Silo Project” next door, by Mark Valenzuela, Michael Carney, Miles Dunne and James Sheppard, depicts a space riddled with strange life, new creatures born of the dark, George Graetz film “Visceral” seems to suggest a hungry human population ingesting, writhing and worshipping this magic ooze.
The artistic imagination is itself a bilge. A place to capture the run-off, the excess, the ephemera, to process and digest and to bubble up potent brews.
Ian Gibbins’ “Bilgestruck” performs this feat, spewing up new language from discarded words, while the AI ship in the background of his work has been created by Midjourney, its algorithm drawing from a bilge of harvested data of gleaned images to spit forth something new.
Our sleeping mind does this – it processes the mental junk our waking brain accumulates and turns it into dreams. Like Ferdinand’s father in “The Tempest”, the waters, deep and dark, work a transformation. As Ariel put it;
“Full fathom five thy father lies
of his bones are coral made
those are pearls that were his eyes
nothing of him that cloth fade
but doth suffer a sea change
into something rich and strange
So when the internet asks “Should my bilge be dry” as it does in Jaqueline’s work, we can confidently answer “No”.
But Tony’s also told me that bilge shares an etymological root with the word bulge. It describes the generous curves of a ship’s hull or in Thom Buchanan’s work, a round, tattooed belly. There are a number of works in this show that speak to these curves, Christine Cholewa’s stockings and balls and Quentin Gore’s “Lowlife”.
But it is most ominous in Tony’s own PP2540, a sand casting pattern for a demolition ball. The brutal, violent roundness of this object reminds us of the continuous existential threat these old buildings face. It was Tony’s idea to hold these exhibitions here, because he knows we’ll never miss what we haven’t seen and can’t remember. You are invited into this space so you can appreciate it.
Tonight I ask you to extend that appreciation to all 38 artists in this show, thank you all for your wonderful, rich and bilgy work and to our wonderful curator Tony Kearney, who has gathered us all together and filled this old space with a potent brew of pure imagination.
*Speech as posted by Tony Kearney 1.3.23
*Photo by Cath Duncan
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