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BODIES OF WORK:

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BUNKERS, BEACH-STRIPES & ICES – new painting, sculpture & digital Art

Artist Talk - Jeni in conversation with Mark Cook MA (Art Hist) QTL, DTTLS, BA  (Hons). Lecturer of Fine Art & Design, Creative & Digital Arts, Faculty of the Creative Arts and Service Industries (CASI) at The Guernsey Institute.

 

                   “Jeni’s artwork is indicative of the contemporary ability to openly question societies gender politics utilising the German Fortifications to encapsulate her political messages. Within her compositions she grafts new semiotic meanings onto the masculine architecture, creating juxtapositions of conflicting imagery and ideologies that force the onlooker to engage in a dialogue with their own cultural biases, completely inverting the structures original symbolism of male domination and political intolerance. The emasculation of the original message is achieved by re-appropriating militaristic objects and pacifying and re-gendering them through the use of ‘Kitsch ornament playfully reproduced (and) placed on top of a bunker to create a political and aesthetic narrative’.[1] In his article on the recent spate of tearing  down of statues, Keith Lowe proposes that ‘Ridicule is better than rope’ and that ‘[..] adding an equally striking image – even if it is as banal as a traffic cone – allows us to preserve our history whilst simultaneously expressing our feelings about it’.[2] Unlike statues the eradication of the concrete structures is not an option and Jeni Snell’s work exemplifies this other possibility, illustrating how humour can be used to conjure a contemporary narrative within a historic conflict environment and engender a ‘narrative of mocking resistance’.[3] Foucault’s principle of fluidity is present as Jeni reinterprets the remains to reveal ongoing changes in society, manipulating the structures meanings to reflect a post stonewall world.” Mark Cook.  Extract from ‘Festung Guernsey, ideology, escapism, gender, and space: The art of occupation’ by Mark Cook.

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Ice-creams represent leisure and recreation. Most of us have memories of an excursion to the seaside or a city park on a hot and sunny day where we’ve enjoyed an ice-cream to mark the occasion as well as to try to keep cool. My new paintings and brutalist ice-creams evolved during the Covid 19 lockdown as I contemplated my relationship with leisure time and the new restrictions to our freedom and liberty. Coincidentally, during the WW11 German Occupation of the Channel Islands, our beaches were cordoned off and made out-of-bounds for recreation as military coastal defences were built and put into operation. So, loss-of-freedom, isolation, and fear of an uncertain future, resurfaced as we navigated unsteadily through the Pandemic, and this time can be considered an occupation-of-sorts. This exhibition is a celebration of reclaiming our beaches, coast and recreation & leisure pursuits whilst not forgetting our historic wartime past. And in a wider context, that not everyone is as fortunate to have their freedom and liberty as we generally do.

My paintings and digital artworks feature some significant bunkers from my childhood, and some of my favourite bunkers from further afield, amidst a ‘fantasy seaside-iconography of beach-stripes and ice-creams/ lollies which highlight their strategic placing along the coast but also ‘at the seaside’. These stripes shout beachwear & beach equipment and ice-cream Kiosk hoardings. Queen Victoria is credited for the nautical stripe of the Royal Navy’s blue and white sailor uniform being adopted in coastal leisurewear even before the French marinère was introduced to French Navy seamen (by having a sailor suit made for her eldest son). This coincided with seaside resorts exploding onto the scene and stripes were the decoration of choice for everything ‘beach’.

Ices placed on top of bunkers is also a playful ongoing reference to my interest in WW11 camouflage; in particular it’s limitations and even absurdity - such as gun-emplacements ‘camouflaged’ as houses. My pairing of ices and bunkers function as an anti-camouflage beacon, drawing more attention to their presence within the landscape whilst further undermining the war machine, and metaphorically oppression and control mechanisms in general. Whilst researching the stripe I was delighted to learn more about its historic transgressive use on cloth and in clothing since the Middle Ages. Europe’s draconian ‘sumptuary laws’ enforced clear social boundaries that secured social privilege and the wearing of stripes by citizens deemed as ‘deviants of society’, in order to ‘marginalise’, ‘degrade’ and ‘identify’ those who were relegated to being ‘outside the social order’. The ‘prison stripe’ seemed particularly relevant during lockdown as well.

The origins of frozen desserts date back as far as 550 BC, the numerous developments of which have coincided with new discoveries of cooling and freezing techniques. The common factor is it was ‘expensive’ and generally therefore ‘only available to the rich and elite’. Ice-cream became more accessible in England in the mid-nineteenth century, when Swiss émigré Carlo Gatti set up the first stand outside Charing Cross station in 1851 where he interestingly ‘sold scoops in shells’ for one penny. Thousands of day-trippers headed to the coast on excursion trains so the need for food and entertainment paved the way for beach kiosks and ice-cream vendors which is how this ‘seaside tradition’ was created. Today the consistent rising global temperature and the devastating consequences, attributed mainly to human behaviour affect not only our own species, but inevitably all fauna and flora as well as our home planet itself. My ice-creams can also be viewed as a reference to global warming.

As well as it being a visual signifier to Guernsey’s German Occupation heritage, I often work with cast-concrete methodology to create my sculptures to give them additional meaning. I also adopt the make-do-and-mend creative resourcefulness of Channel-Islanders under Occupation by combining found discarded objects collected from my daily walks in the city (in London where I live), with my made objects - also frequently fabricated using found objects such as food packaging and drinks containers as moulds. Re-purposing and re-cycling developed from my life-choices (largely to maintain surviving as an Artist), into my Arts Practice, and this has become a proactive ecological stand against our ‘yet still’ throw-away society and the increasing ‘rich and poor divide’ during these very difficult economic times.

It is ironic that part of the vast Mirus Battery site became the foundations for a school (La Houguette Infants and Primary School), and that abandoned military spaces in general have become natural habitats – both of which nurture growth in the broadest sense. In her celebrated and award-wining book ‘Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape’ which explores abandoned places such as exclusion zones, no man’s lands and fortress Islands – and what happens when nature is left undisturbed to reclaim its place following the wreckage of human damage and destruction, author Cal Flyn presents a haunting-yet-hopeful and insightful ecological investigation of how a ‘self-willed ecosystem’ of fauna and flora can over time recuperate, heal, and flourish – such as the colonization of post-conflict concrete bunkers in Guernsey. Flyn explores the  ‘basic processes of ecological succession’ occurring with the absence of human presence which produces natural ‘exclusion zones that serve effectively as strict nature reserves’. Flyn poetically gives examples of nature’s healing reclamation from her personal experience of various locations she visited explaining that ‘each [place] offer[ed] [it’s] own flavour of melancholy and hope: they show us how every site no matter how devastated, can come to recover in its own way, but also how human impacts can leave a long shadow for many years – decades – centuries – after these sites have fallen to disuse’.

Derelict buildings are often a magnet for young people experimenting with sex, drugs and graffiti in their  personal journey of self-discovery, out of sight from the parental gaze and the authoritative enforcement of  rules and restrictions. Street artist’s such as Keith Haring (LGBTQ+ rights activist in 80’s New York subways) and Banksy (using satire and humour about art, philosophy and politics, England 2000’s - current) are acknowledged as significant in contemporary culture and art history. Graffiti tends not to happen in Guernsey, but along the Atlantic Wall, bunkers attract graffiti artists who use concrete as their canvas and the beach as their gallery. There is a poetic irony that young people are expressing themselves freely by ‘defacing architecture of war’ when we consider the  strict control over art and culture that Nazi Fascism enforced. Whether an ‘activist slogan’,  ’wall art’ or even  just a ‘tag’ executed in a colourful industrial-like urban aesthetic ensures being ‘seen and heard’ by passers-by in a world where the young are so often unheard (partly due to the restrictive voting age). Graffiti is important as a creative and subversive message conveyor often challenging the status quo. It is no surprise then that is it also predominantly young people whose generation/s are most going to bear the consequences of our, and our forefather’ actions, that are the most active in protesting and making change.

 

 

KIOSK

Ice-creams represent leisure and recreation. Most of us have memories of an excursion to the seaside or a city park on a hot and sunny day when we’ve enjoyed an ice-cream to mark the occasion as well as try to keep cool. My ‘brutalist ice-creams’ evolved during the Covid 19 lockdown as I contemplated my relationship with leisure time and the new restrictions to our freedom and liberty. During the WW11 German Occupation of the Channel Islands, our beaches were cordoned off and made out-of-bounds for recreation as military coastal defences were built and put into operation. Loss-of-freedom, isolation, and fear of an uncertain future, resurfaced as we navigated unsteadily through the Pandemic, and this time can be considered an occupation-of-sorts. My brutalist ice-creams are a celebration of reclaiming our beaches, coast and recreation & leisure pursuits whilst not forgetting our historic wartime past. Or in a wider context, that not everyone is as fortunate to have their freedom and liberty as we generally do.

As well as it being a visual signifier to Guernsey’s German Occupation heritage, I often work with cast-concrete methodology to create my sculptures to give them additional meaning. I also adopt the make-do-and-mend creative resourcefulness of Channel-Islanders under occupation by combining found discarded objects collected from my daily walks in the city (in London were I now live), with my made objects - also frequently fabricated using found objects such as food packaging and drinks containers as moulds. Re-purposing and re-cycling developed from my life-choices into my arts practice and is an ecological statement against human greed and our throw-away society.

My paintings and digital artworks* feature some significant bunkers from my childhood, and some of my favourite bunkers from further afield, amidst a ‘fantasy seaside-iconography of beach-stripes and ice-creams/ lollies which highlight their strategic placing along the coast but also ‘at the seaside’. These stripes shout beachwear & beach equipment and ice-cream Kiosk hoardings. I’m also playfully referencing my interest in WW11 camouflage; in particular it’s limitations, failure and even absurdity - such as gun-emplacements attempting to be houses. These unlikely pairings emphasise this failure whilst undermining the war machine, and metaphorically oppression and control mechanisms in general. Whilst researching the stripe I was delighted to learn more about its transgressive use on cloth and in clothing. The prison stripe seemed particularly relevant during the lockdown as well.

I love graffiti; it is creative, political and subversive. It is generally executed upon walls of derelict or dull urban spaces as bold colours boasting ‘tags’, activist slogans, or incredible artworks - which I think can enhance a rundown environment. This tends not to happen in Guernsey, but along the Atlantic Wall, bunkers are a magnet for the graffiti artists who use concrete as their canvas and the beach as their gallery. There is a poetic irony that young people are expressing themselves freely by ‘defacing architecture of war’ when we consider the strict control over art and culture that Nazi fascism enforced.

*By digital art I mean paintings and drawings made using pixels executed on a drawing-tablet with a drawing and painting tool. These digital works can be viewed on screens or printed. My images are printed on German Hahnemühle Fine Art archival printing paper in a signed-limited-edition. 

 

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ACHTUNG BABY!

Achtung Baby! Achtung Baby! The musical title references U2’s 1991 studio album produced by Island Records which was inspired by the 1990 German reunification. Having this reference is important to me because during my teens the only access I had to Queer Culture with positive and inspiring role models was through listening to the song lyrics of ‘out’ singer-songwriters, musicians and LGBTQ+ activists such as Bronski Beat (later Communards), Erasure, Frankie goes to Hollywood and Soft Cell.

 

Within a mocking narrative of resistance, either bunkers or other elements of warfare are combined with kitsch ceramic animal ornaments, toy soldiers (with their faces covered with neon stars), a judges wig (appropriated from the cover of the Gilbert and Sullivan Operetta – Iolanthe, a life-size model of an ice-cream (that I came upon during one summer at a pop-up ice-cream vendor in Victoria station), a drawing of a head of a Bichon Frise dog (resembling a moon with a face), fearful deer, and two odd-looking wild beasts - an alarmed tiger and a confused bear (appropriated from Victorian cut-outs).

 

The the redundant fortifications can also be considered as anthropomorphic symbols of the melancholic-self as a queer teenager growing up during Thatcher’s homophobic 1980’s. The bunkers represent loss of freedom, fear, isolation and uncertain future.

 

I am also interested in the concept of WW11 camouflage, in particular it’s limitations and often absurdity. These unlikely pairings playfully emphasizes this failure whilst symbolically undermining oppression and control mechanisms.

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BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

Between A Rock And A Hard Place is a series of digital collages, prints and paintings. I combine and/or substitute images symbolic of weaponry and warfare; such as bunkers, fighter aircraft, bombs and missiles - with kitsch, amusing or unrealistic images of ceramic ornaments, animals, toys, the artificial phallus, or foliage, to playfully build a humorous narrative that undermines and ridicules oppression and control.

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I work from images that I photograph myself; such as the bunkers I re-visit and re-document on my frequent returns to Guernsey, or interesting objects that I feel have relevant poignant and/or kitsch qualities – and/or existing images which I appropriate and re-work (and reference); such as the photographs of bunkers taken by the French War Theorist, Paul Virilio for 'Bunker Archeology'. In my paintings I use different types of paint and different methods of paint application such as spray paint, watercolour, acrylic, oil and household paint to achieve different surface qualities and textures.

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Although my work is not about making LGBTQ Art or Art with a clear LGBTQ subject, my own experience of being a young LGBTQ person growing up in Guernsey is present within my work through analogy and metaphor. In this wider sense I have always viewed the bunker as ‘a symbol of the self' because I feel there is a parallel between growing up pre-acceptance of homosexuality and gender diversity with that of the isolated bunker being widely viewed as a blot upon the landscape scattered amongst dwellings; their architectural brutalism stripped bare and their solitude making them stand out.

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I am interested in the concept of camouflage, with reference to the Occupation of the Channel Islands during WW11, and in particular, its limitations; that the bunkers as architecture-of-war, such as the MIRUS Battery with their huge guns, were artificially camouflaged, crudely and therefore largely unsuccessfully, sometimes even as houses in order to blend in with the rest of the residential landscape. Over time through natural erosion their decomposition back into the landscape (especially considering the concrete was made by the sand from the beaches) can be viewed as a poetic metaphor of the triumph of nature, and man as aggressor's failure and defeat. In an LGBTQ context this is journey towards acceptance and equality.

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COAST

Coast paintings feature the domestic and redundant-military architectural landscape of Guernsey’s west coast where I played and explored as a child. Views up the beach from the water’s edge at low tide evoke memories of stolen glances away from the innocence of rock pool adventures. Beyond the foreground of sand and seaweed debris; the outcome of a recently violent storm… (an allusion to its dark historical past or a hermetically-sealed present?), massive blocks of granite- to keep out the sea, and steel-reinforced concrete anti-tank walls- to keep out a no-longer-existent enemy, partially conceal domestic and military buildings. Our view-point is that of the enemy from the approach of the sea, a first encounter maybe from out of the ‘no-where-ness’ of the oceans abyss, to ‘some-where’, a periphery, a no-man’s land of appearing and disappearing land that is the beach. Generally devoid of human activity, the buildings themselves become anthropomorphic. From the idea of ‘homelike’ (belonging to the home) is the development of something withdrawn from the eyes of strangers, something concealed, secret… ‘heimlich’ now easily becomes ‘unheimlich’- unhomely as the notion of something hidden and dangerous. Within this eerie stillness, an atmosphere of subtle melancholy, these beholders of secrets, meet our gaze to dare or implore us to venture further (a warning or a cry for help?) Yet the barrier of the wall as well as the paintings lack of illusionistic depth prevents us from entering into them- an emotional as well as a physical boundary.  This mutilated space with its dramatic positioning is still, however, unable to command the dominant presence of the buildings beyond. These paintings imply a passing of time, of a knowing based on observation, study and experience… a sense of familiarity that threatens to reveal something unbearably disturbing. These paintings convey a sense of moral as well as ecological decay.

 

BLOCKHOUSE Anka Dabrowska and Jeni Snell

 

My name is Ellie Phillips, I would like to let you know about a forthcoming joint installation ‘blockhouse’ by Anka Dabrowska and Jeni Snell at Jealous Gallery, London. Anka Dabrowska’s work has been previously written about by Rebecca Geldard for Guardian Guide, and has been reviewed in Time Out. Anka has exhibited with Seven Seven Gallery, and at the 4x4 show at Sartorial Contemporary Art. Jeni Snell has recently completed an installation at the Delfina Foundation and has previously exhibited in Kay Saatchi and Catriona Warren’s Anticipation exhibition at Ultra Lounge, Selfridges and at Whitechapel gallery in group show Iceberg Enters Obelisk. The installation will be Anka and Jeni’s first collaborative project since their joint drawing show in the Baltic Centre in 2005.

Jeni will be presenting an ongoing installation called MIRUS which is a modular assemblage of flat interlocking plywood pieces which Jeni describes as “like giant Playplax pieces”. Playplax was a late-1960’s child’s-building-toy which evoked the imagination of a nation to construct fabulous fantasy cities. Jeni made MIRUS as an adult-sized version of this. In its recent incarnation at the Delfina Foundation visitors to the gallery were invited to ‘revert back into a state of play’ by building and decorating the structure with an array of paint, foam, tape and mark-making implements using imagery associated with military buildings. Desert camouflage netting was also used to transform the gallery space into a series of improvised tunnels and dens. This brought together the contrasting ideologies of child’s play and military warfare to reference Jeni’s personal experience of play amongst redundant military buildings in Guernsey as well as the stark reality of children today playing in war zones during current conflict. Exploring the themes of children’s games such as ‘building and construction’, ‘hide and seek’ and through activities like ‘drawing, painting, tracing and colouring-in’, the work aims to explore the potentiality of play as a political gesture.

 

Anka reinscribes the Eastern Bloc architecture, street signs, shop fronts and military paraphernalia of her past in Warsaw onto found packaging such as paper bags and champagne boxes collected in London. Her delicate line drawings and cardboard architectural models combine unlikely sites and sources; communist and consumerist, private and public, past and present, memory and archive.

Both artists will also be producing a limited edition screen print to coincide with the show, made and published by the Jealous Print Studio.

 

MIRUS

MIRUS is an installation project named after the German gun battery on which the school the artist attended as a child was built. The installation comprises of modular assemblage pieces of flat plywood that can be built to achieve various formations due to their interlocking parts.  Jeni describes this as “like giant Playplax pieces”. Playplax was a late-1960’s child’s-building-toy which evoked the imagination of a nation to construct fabulous fantasy cities. Jeni made MIRUS as an adult-sized version of this. In its recent incarnation at the Delfina Foundation visitors to the gallery were invited to revert back into ‘a state of play’ by building and decorating the structure with an array of paint, foam, tape and mark-making implements using imagery associated with military buildings (such as natural/ artificial camouflage, natural decay and erosion- moulds, mosses, rust, military stenciling and graffiti ) in conjunction with using desert camouflage netting (bought second-hand from the British MOD, so bringing it’s ‘mystery’ history to the work) to transform the gallery space into a series of improvised tunnels and dens to bring together the contrasting ideologies of child’s play and military warfare. MIRUS references Jeni’s personal experience of play amongst redundant military buildings in Guernsey as well as the reality of children today playing in war zones during current conflict. Exploring the themes of children’s games such as ‘building and construction’, ‘hide and seek’ and activities like ‘drawing, painting, tracing and colouring-in’, the work aims to explore the potentiality of play as a political

gesture.

MI-R-US Delfina, Installation-performance, 2008.

Playground/Battlefield Artist Talks (Part I): Jeni Snell in conversation with Pr. Barry Curtis, Emeritus Professor at Middlesex University, Fellow of the London Consortium & Visiting Tutor at the Royal College of Art.

Inspired by her experience of growing up and playing amidst redundant military buildings in the Island of Guernsey, Jeni Snell's architectural installations bring about the state of play to an adult audience, within a gallery context. Weaving together two contrasting realities, that of childhood innocence and the architecture of war, Jeni's work aims to break down pre-conceived notions of gender and sexuality to prompt us to consider the impact that our early environment has upon the formation of our identity.

Jeni Snell's MI-R-US (installation-performance) is a multi-piece wooden structure, which uses the tactile language of modular construction games such as Playplax. Join the artist and take part in an imaginary nation-building exercise: every evening, Jeni invites you to revert into a state of play and add your mark to the fabulous MI-R-US edifice.
 

FORTRESS - Inflatable bunker 

Fortress - inflatable bunker is a soft sculpture that presents the viewer an opportunity to ‘take part in art’ or to be ‘physically engaged with an artwork’. Reverting into a state of play we are re-united with an important part of ourselves which so often becomes lost along with our youth. Fortress prompts our re-consideration of space, place and the effect that our environment has on how we perceive and interact within.

In isolation as an independent sculptural form Fortress is ever-so-slightly in perpetual motion due to the air-inlet that keeps it blown up. The audible humming of the motor and the inflatable’s exaggerated proportions gives it an appealingly comical character that becomes highlighted when activated by the viewer. Reclining, sitting, or jumping inside Fortress provides a visual-spectacle for the onlooker as well as the all-important inner-spectacle for those participating.

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Referencing military inflatable decoys whilst using the accessible language of the bouncy castle, Fortress is a playful yet political work that undermines the inherent meaning of the represented object of military aggression. The air-filled form, swollen with sexual connotation, contributes to make impotent the objects of war and in doing so stand in resistance to the use of weaponry and oppression. This work contributes to the debate of happiness as a tool for protest.

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This work was inspired by the artist growing up in Guernsey, the Channel Islands, which was the only British territory to be occupied by Germany during the Second World War. Long since de-militarised, these redundant fortifications still dominate the Island’s coastal landscape. The experience of going to a school built on top of a bunker brought the opposing dynamics of childhood innocence and the architecture of war together in the playground. Fortress is modelled on an existing redundant WWII German Battery Command Post.

 

Feedback from visitor Jim Shieff.

 

                    “Just wanted to say again how much I enjoyed leaping about on your exhibit ‘Fortress’ – and how great its artistic impact was on me. ‘Fortress’ is now for me the definition of the word ‘tactile’. When I first saw it, I thought immediately of the opening of the film ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and straight away I wanted to feel and touch ‘Fortress’ and play war-games on it. The way it quietly twitches seems to be a sort of come-on message to the spectator. I see you were born in Guernsey, so I expect you grew up with a lot of military architecture around. At my primary school in Lancaster in the 1950’s, there was a mouldy, decaying bomb shelter in the field next to the playground. It was out of bounds during the day, but they couldn’t stop us going there after school. I have memories of it, happy but also disturbing. ‘Fortress’ manages to counterpoint the carnage of war with the joy of active play and so combines the tragic and the comic, as does life itself. I can’t remember who said it, but it’s so true that ‘you don’t stop playing because you grow old; you grow old because you stop playing’”.  

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Sponsorship: The Juliet Gomperts Trust, University of the Arts London - Artist and Collectors Bursery, and Kim Grierson.

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FORTRESS SARTORIAL GRAFFITI EVENT

Jeni invites visitors to Graffiti her inflatable bunker at Sartorial Contemporary Art. This audience-interactive event will take her inflatable bunker to a new point of conclusion that explores the more illicit relationships between community and environment, in this case young people and derelict buildings; graffiti, illegal parties, sex and drugs. Jeni is interested in the re-animation of redundant military buildings and urban architectural space. The Fortress Sartorial graffiti event aims to prompt our reconsideration of space, place and the effect that our environment has on us and consequently how we perceive and interact with it.

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