Jenny Francis' latest installation

The other day I saw Jenny trying to move a table. 'Let me help you with that,' I said. 'Where do you want it?' 'Just over here,' she said, 'where it will be out of the way.' What I didn't realise is that what would be 'out of the way' was her latest installation, a continuation of the themes she has been exploring of body image and self-image, particularly of women. Last year she drew silhouette outlines around people on lengths of wallpaper, then asked them to circle with chunky marker pens the parts of their bodies that they didn't like. This year the visitor was confronted with...



...a table covered with a range of smoothies in plastic cups with bubble dome covers with jaunty straws stuck in, and brightly coloured stickers on the side. There was a bubblicious menu as well. So far so much like many fast-food outlets purporting to serve 'healthy' food. Food, I thought eagerly, having been drawn to the table like a magnet at the prospect. I wonder if we're supposed to sample this stuff. I hesitated. Somewhere along the line, without my realising it, I must have imbibed a rule that said 'DON'T EAT THE ART'. Or at least, not unless you're absolutely sure that you're supposed to. Caffi Clonc had, after all, been advertised as a cafe. But what about this? I peered closer.



There are certain colours that food 'ought' to be. This bran colouring wasn't quite what I expected in a smoothie. I peered closer at the 'menu'. The contents of each smoothie were the entire menu of what the artist ate each day of the week. So the smoothies were... all that food, whizzed together in a blender: toast, breakfast cereal, vegetables, fruit, cakes, the lot. Which made the results disturbingly like what we see when we are sick to our stomachs. Ugh.

Upon reflection, of course, there is nothing wrong with eating any of the smoothie ingredients individually. It was just the idea of having them all together that provoked the gag reflex. And yet, there was the menu.



Each day of the week was labelled with a very self-critical comment: 'too many carbs Wednesday', 'can't stop eating Saturday'. So there it was - the reality of the attitudes to food of so many women (and some men), so much of the time.

Something to chew on.


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Caffi Clonc revisited

I wanted to think a bit more about Anna Evans' work in Caffi Clonc, as well as her more recent entry in the CCP end-of-year show. As with other of her work, she is concerned with words and language.

What of these word biscuits in Caffi Clonc? Their meaning, on one level, was determined by the viewer, more specifically, the viewer previous to oneself. So on a specific level, my experience was of 'WONDERLUST', covered by sugary dust, which reminded me of the new undergraduate art group of that name recently formed at the School of Art, of wanderlust, of wonderment, of lust - and of all the words I subsequently formed by eating selected letters. Then the taste of the biscuits - crispy chocolate with cinnamon, like Proust's madeleine, evocative of other childhood biscuit experiences, particularly Dutch mass-produced cinnamon windmill biscuits I used to enjoy, and also 'animal crackers', boxed biscuits in the shape of circus animals - not exactly the same as letter biscuits, but the idea of representational biscuits coming in sets, that might be eaten in a particular order. Other people's biscuit evocations would of course be different, culturally determined, you might say.

But more generally, the Caffi Clonc biscuits evoked the idea of 'eating your words', in an amusing and ironic way. The cafe setting, where so much of the expected was delivered (tablecloth, place settings, low lighting, relaxing music, waitress, hot drinks in ceramic cups), was carefully subverted in a few important ways: The guests, limited to three, were all facing the same way, and facing a blank white wall. Instead of looking directly at each other, contemplating art on the wall, or a window, or even the process of tea-making, they were left to... contemplate nothing, the nature of nothingness? It was very important to Anna that everything in the room, except the guests and food, should be pure black and white. Secondly, what was served was both food and words - unexpected, focusing a great deal of attention on the main artifact, the biscuit letters. And thirdly, after the biscuits were consumed, the guest was asked to select the word for the next guest, leaving it open to continue from the previous word with a related word, or to start a completely different theme. (A few days later, I spotted Anna and her waitress tallying up the words, so to speak, trying to make meaning out of the series of words generated throughout the day - an alternative way of keeping the books.) For the guest, there was a random, almost Dadaist feeling to receive the word, an interactive, in-control feeling to give the word. And of course that activity replaced the expected activity at the end of a cafe visit: paying the bill.

As the penguins, paper or otherwise, from Mary Poppins might have said, 'It's complimentar-ee!'



Anna's entry in the CCP mid year show, 'Sustenance', similarly appeared to be a series of letters on a ceramic plate. Now to those of you living outside of Wales, this may appear to be a Dadaistic collection of letters. But it is in fact a Welsh word, the word for 'information' or 'knowledge' (pronounced GWEE boh DIETH).

The exhibition label read:

'Sustenance

'Sugar, Glucose, Water, Vegetable Oil, Maize Starch, Sorbitol, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids, Coboxy Methyl Cellulose, Polyglycerol Esters of Fatty Acids, Acetic Acid, propylene Glycol, Cloth, Wood & Ceramic.

'N.F.S.'

This list of ingredients, redolent of those on supermarket packets, leads us to consider whether our information is prepackaged - by the media, by school curricula, by universities (even by bloggers!) - and what quality it might be. Where did she find all those artificial-sounding ingredients? Were the letters actually formed from a store-bought cake mix?

It also suggests a congruence between the production of art and the production of the kitchen, in a more explicit way than Caffi Clonc. As women artists, are we going to be classified as working in the domestic sphere by our choice of materials, or can we/should we define ourselves as industrial producers, as suggested by the ingredients list, or as fine art producers, as suggested by the manner of presentation (minimal white, exhibition label, location in a fine art exhibition in a fine art school)? Are these questions of gender in art even relevant any more? (Mind you, I don't see any of the male third year students baking anything as part of their portfolio.) Anna again has a lot of questions on her plate (so to speak).

A few days later I saw the letters on the plate rearranged to spell 'WHAT GDO BYE' [sic]. A fitting end to the term.

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Caffi Clonc

Last time I said there was always something going on in the School of Art. Well, today I had the nicest cup of tea I've had in ages.

It was part of an installation by Anna Evans called Caffi Clonc (clonc is Welsh for chat, and caffi is, well, cafe). Conceptually she is looking at language and the role it plays in society (in other projects as well: she told me that for nearly a year now, she has been cutting the hundredth word out of every issue of the Cambrian News). Practically the event was a transformation of the bare, scruffy walls of the project room into elegant black and white, with dim lighting, a long table with a white table cloth, three black seats, three white candles, and three black tiles. Visitors were presented with a slim menu offering a range of hot and cold drinks, and a choice of three flavours of 'word snacks': chocolate with cinnamon, ginger, or something fruity. I of course ordered the chocolate with cinnamon, and a peppermint tea. As I sat I was pleased to meet people I had never seen or talked to before (first years and art history students). It never occurred to me to wonder what words I might be served, or whether I would have a selection of random letters, like alphabet soup, but sweeter. Imagine my delight at being presented with a white plate dusted in white powdered sugar, lightly covering the word 'WONDERLUST'. Wonderlust is the name of a group of second year students planning a first exhibition in the restaurant on top of Constitution Hill.

Anyway, the biscuits were such fun to eat. It was hard to know where to start, and eventually I settled on a process of subtraction,

trying to make new words from the remaining letters each time I ate some, so 'WON LUST', 'ON LUST', 'LUST', and 'US' appeared on my plate, followed by the ghostly shadow of the original word, white plate against white sugar shadow, where the biscuits had once been. All the while quiet jazz added to the relaxed atmosphere. When I had finished my biscuits the waitress appeared again and offered me a 'words menu', instructing me to choose letters to make a word or short phrase for the next guest. I was then so excited to see the reaction of the next person to my word that I hung around taking pictures and savouring my tea, even after offering my seat to the next guest. And then... my word was spelled wrong! But it was a proper name, an unusual one, so fair enough...

Anna would like to do another cafe, which is a good thing, since several people said that we should have something like this every week!

more on Caffi Clonc

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