3.1 Beris Blake
After years working as a builder, plasterer and then porter, Beris Blake converted his small Nunhead garden into an open air studio and started carving. He does it he tells me, “to keep busy, to cheer me up… just happy going along, drawing inside when it rains”. Each figure is made from found wood and shaped by hand over one month. ‘I get to the finish, and don’t want to finish them…I get so attached to them, don’t want to sell them…”
Never formerly trained as an artist he used to watch his Uncle making works in Jamaica, and drew trees, trucks and lorries for the other children at school.
(interview July 2011)
3.2 Jacquie Utley
The Nunhead Open is a welcoming, friendly event; straightforward for new artists to submit work. For many it is the first time they have shown their art in a public place as: “Over time you get to know people who live in the area”.
3.3 ‘distanciation’
‘Thus feminist artists concerned to explicate the character of women’s oppression within the classed and radically divided patriarchal societies cannot be content to describe its appearances and symptoms. Structural determinations need to be excavated and tracked through their articulation in representation. Brechtian notions of radical art as non-unity, as a many faceted collage/montage which is open to the play of contradictions inspired new ways of making art, in performance and time-based works…’ (Pollock 2003: 84)
Pollock, Griselda (2003) ‘Screeening the Seventies: Sexuality and Representation in feminist practice – a Brechtian Perspective’ (pp 73-95) in The feminism and visual culture reader ed. Amelia Jones, Routledge
3.4 Ah! Sunflower and Poetic Clarity
In 1792 Blake was strolling in an outskirt of South London and found a solitary sunflower growing in an apple orchard. Arrayed in all its glory the flower shone a dark amber, falling in an angelic shower.