How 'Bethink' was born

Bethink Arts has become my trading name which derived from the title of my degree show exhibition ‘Bethink’ in Loughborough 2006. Bethink was then selected by Stroud House Gallery to feature in a group exhibition ‘Text Driven’ at Gloucestershire 2007.

As most artists can empathise – the documenting and archiving work is so very important but often gets forgotten in the whirlwind of executing shows.

I am not going to woolgather too much here on ‘Bethink’ as I plan to not use this blog to solely evidence my past exhibits – but just wanted to start this blog with some roots.

Bethink was an installation that used Moving images, B&W Photographs, Found Objects, 100 Black Balloons, Letter replies and a sound piece.

The piece started when I found a listing on eBay, which started at a penny. A daughter was selling off all of her fathers photography equipment because he had recently become blind. She was selling an old Film that she thought could have been exposed but didn’t have the time or desire to peruse it further. The paragraph she had written so dryly crept into the darkness of my mind and it affected my whole balance on what I thought ‘value’ and ‘cherish’ was about. Through this simple listing I found myself wanting to desperately voice something. It is still difficult now to contextualise exactly what, but from purely being touched by something listed on eBay it spiralled into my heart and this was the beginning of Bethink.

When returning home from university that weekend I still had a tense feeling in my tummy – unable to logically sequence a plan of action I plucked my GCSE ‘poetry Anthology’ off my old bookshelf and started to flick through it. Then I got to a folded page. It revealed one of my favourite poems from school which I had forgotten about:

My grandmother – Elizabeth Jennings

She kept an antique shop – or it kept her.

Among Apostle spoons and Bristol glass,

The faded silks, the heavy furniture,

She watched her own reflection in the brass

Salvers and silver bowls, as if to prove

Polish was all, there was no need of love.

And I remember how I once refused

To go out with her, since I was afraid.

It was perhaps a wish not to be used

Like antique objects. Though she never said

That she was hurt, I still could feel the guilt

Of that refusal, guessing how she felt.

Later, too frail to keep a shop, she put

All her best things in one long, narrow room.

The place smelt old, of things too long kept shut,

The smell of absences where shadows come

That can’t be polished. There was nothing then

To give her own reflection back again.

And when she died I felt no grief at all,

Only the guilt of what I once refused.

I walked into her room among the tall

Sideboards and cupboards – things she never used

But needed: and no finger-marks were there,

Only the new dust falling through the air.

I tore the page out and folded it safely in my pocket. That day I went with my Dad to the Ripley Army Surplus store and took a few pics.

On returning to university I bought a newspaper and headed into the studio. The middle page was a double military obituary page, which read 100 soldiers died in the Iraq war. I found myself wanting to cut these individual faces and names out, as they deserved their own boarder and significance as one. From here I made paper dog tags for each of them and enlarged pictures of them each on 8x10 B&W pictures, which featured as a large mourning, wall in the exhibition. The dog tags were tied to a black balloons (100 black helium filled balloons in total) which I released in May with my address stamped on the back.

Over the next couple of months I had phone calls through the night and letters returning that had reached as far as Switzerland. A man called Dave had seen a black balloon dance in front of his window screen in the car at night. He followed it up a hill to retrieve it and wrote me the most beautiful letter. He said that he had recently lost his wife Carol and he was sure that it was her sending him a message. The letters and phone calls continued and all except one of them had very emotional content where they felt the balloon was commemorating a lost loved one. The name of the soldier had almost become secondary to the people who had received it – so I began mounting the replies with red pins. For the exhibition I used another 100 balloons where the spectators could commemorate their loved ones.

I could talk about this exhibition for many more pages expressing what I wanted it to achieve, what it did achieve and how this effected the re-installment at Stroud but I think for now you’ve heard enough. I love talking flowers – but regurgitating the extensive thought process and creation in detail would be a books worth. All I can say is to have people making such an emotional link to the work was overwhelming and this desire to voice something – to touch people and cause haptics within a space will always possess me. Bethink was a successful demonstration of how layers and communication become the centre point of an exhibition no matter how powerful the content your stimulating. So, this is why I wanted to use ‘Bethink Arts’ as my business name: D