Hello! How’s it going? I hope you’re doing great. This evening I’ve got for you some thoughts from an exhibition that’s on at Garfield Mill, Hawick, Scottish Borders right now (until 20th September). There’s so much more I could write about Molly’s work, but here’s what you’re getting for now…
It’s a hard relatability I find, walking into the gallery. Hard as in firm, rather than difficult, actually, which feels strange to say, when all of this is work made around ‘difficult’ subjects, summed up in the exhibition’s title “Contemporary Anxieties”. Strangely, reassuringly, Molly Kent’s larger body of work is titled “Dream Weaving”. It reminds me that it’s maybe not so dire as each of the artworks I’m looking might suggest (or tell me in block capitals).
Katie at Garfield Mill explains to me that Molly makes the images of burning houses as self-portraits. This is after I’ve had a couple of complementary G&Ts, and I’m not sure, I should have asked: Are they the artist the house, or the fire blazing inside? Either seems reasonable.
The digital references within the analogue media of textiles and pottery entice me in before I really start to see what’s being woven here.
I turn around, from a tapestry of a house aflame, eyes staring out of a sky lit with lightning, to find more houses again – these ones made ‘invisible’ by a familiar grey and white checkerboard of a .png’s transparent background.
A combination of digital eras exist in one piece of fabric. Windows 95, 97 perhaps. The red, yellow green spots of a Mac window’s control buttons, the speech bubble with its pregnant dot dot dot. The wool is static, but I can feel the pressure their animation creates.
A fuzzy turfed rug (is it a rug when it’s on a wall?) makes flowers I recognise from Minecraft fit into the 3-D space around me. It’s a joy to have them so close by, so real after hours of playing the game during this summer.
Fire is knotty, yarny chaos; digital sensibility tries to hold it together in neat lines of pixels and almost succeeds.
“EVERYTHING IS BURNING” calmly, softly spoken to me in a black font. Wool, acrylic, cotton. A kind of bubbly texture, making a plushie of a warning.
“System Message: Error in Humanity”
Is that figure being rescued from or lowered into the dark whirlpool below?
“The world is burning, stop pretending everything is fine” I read, after what I wrote last in my own notebook before I came here says “It’s all going to be okay” – I’m kidding myself, of course. I know that. I think of the neon sculpture by Martin Creed at Modern One in Edinburgh with a glowing platitude that makes me feel angry, now I think of it. I’m not sure how I felt about it back when I first saw it years ago, but it feels different after yet another record summer. I think of Julian of Norwich’s “All shall be well, and all shall be well…” and I’m not as frustrated at her. Wikipedia tells me she was born in 1343, so I suppose the context has shifted.
The perfect neon glitch colours in these technically perfect tapestries. The chaos of the broken, pulled into orderly yarns. Under, over, under, over.
“WE’VE FUCKED IT”
And I kind of want that on my wall. It’s funny. Am I just in a good mood today? What does the market for art that strikes so directly on the nose look like?
“The blue screen of death”
A title I write in my notebook before reading that it really is the title of the work I’m looking at. That exact shade of blue, that pixelly 😦 emoticon of the screen of a doomed PC.
The mac’s pinwheel of doom also hides away in a tapestry, my anxieties manifest while I type this very post on a mac from 2019 that sounds like it’s about to start emitting smoke. That tapestry reminds me too much of my day-job when I look at it for too long.
Hard and soft, Clay and wool: this body of work of about 5 years between crafts spans and marries the two like the way Grayson Perry’s does, but Kent does it with not just a colourful joy and a sense of the silly, but with a piercing seriousness that stems directly from the knot in many millennials’ stomachs that is curdled by the flames of the climate crisis we’re living in.
I love that technology is soaked through all of the work I see in here – from the clear references to computers and computer games, to the most of ancient of technologies: the loom, the potter’s wheel. One round vase will show, if spun, flames dancing on our green and blue circle of a world, a storytelling technology from 5000 years ago.
I brought home with me, a packet of postcards and a print that’s now resting temporarily above the piano, a small tapestry showing a mac window enclosing the words “THE END IS HERE” being engulfed by cartoonish flames in red, orange, yellow before a serene flat blue sky. I’m interested to see how my relationship to this print changes over time. I wonder if I’ll be grabbing it one day soon when fleeing from a flood or a fire. I wonder if I’ll find myself laughing at its simplicity when the world doesn’t burn, but gets increasingly complicated in other ways we’ve not imagined yet. I wonder if I’ll laugh, sharing it in some future place to some future youth, saying look, we really thought this was the end. I wonder if it will bring me comfort, a reminder that the world has ended before, has it not?
Jessie x
Linkslinkslinks
Contemporary Anxieties is on at Garfield Mill in Hawick until the 20th of September.
There are also workshops happening on Saturday the 12th with Molly too!
details here:
https://garfieldmill.gallery/events/
Molly’s website lives here:
https://mollyhkent.com
While I don’t know Molly, we’re both members of Neuk collective, a home for neurodivergent artists in Scotland. Find out more here:
Martin Creed at Modern One:
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/106670
Jessie Growden 