1 - 25 September 2010
iArt Gallery Wembley: A Project Room for Contemporary Art
‘The potato came to Europe forgotten in the pocket of a Spanish conquistador around 1500. The European elite decided it was unsuitable for them, but OK for the peasants. Diderot believed it caused flatulence, which is OK for peasants and workers but not for the elite.
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Russian aristocracy refrained from eating the potato and the English did not really want to give it to their peasants, but it was OK to give it to the Irish. They deserved it. It was essentially pig food but it kept their bellies full and their mouths shut. English Protestants thought that the potato was disgusting, it is kind of proven because the average Irishman (Catholic mostly) ate 10 pounds of potatoes a day. So it is disgusting. They eat potatoes, sleep and fornicate only and the potato was therefore “dubbed…Lazy Root, a slur that lives on in phrases like couch potato and potato head.” Blight was responsible for the death of a million Irish people during the 1800s, for human wretchedness.’
- Lee Allen, from In the Devil’s Garden, a sinful history of food
In her latest body of work, Blight, Marlise Keith is concerned with the ways in which we use and live with “nourishing” metaphors. The term “blight” refers to the discolouring and eventual death of plants as a result of incapacity to produce sufficient chlorophyll. The disease is most commonly associated with potatoes, the disease being responsible for the Great Irish Famine in the mid 1800s. In this exhibition, Keith draws on her encounters with people and food, or, more specifically, people who eat food, or don’t, or can’t.
On the one hand, food can be a metaphor for health, prosperity, even luxury. However, on the other hand, as is pointed out in the extract from Lee Allen’s thoughts on potatoes, the metaphor of food can have equally damaging connotations. Keith recalls a girl she once taught who was slowly starving herself. She had tried at some point to explain to the obsessive, gum-chewing child that chewing is not the same as eating. In Keith’s memory of this encounter, the backdrop is Kevin Carter’s famous photograph from the early 1990s in which a vulture seems to stalk a starving child in the southern Sudanese hamlet of Ayod. Keith often thinks of the choices this girl made when enjoying an exquisite meal with her friends, or pondering the ritualistic process of cooking a meal, the pride of sharing a well-loved recipe and the way that writing about food seems to engage all the senses.
Through this recollection, Keith’s thoughts on food become a metaphor for how easily we judge, slur or deliver sentence – not only on other people, but also on ourselves. As the artist puts it: “It is like having the right shoes to run a marathon, but also the chainsaw to off our own legs, at our own discretion and in our own time, and we do.”
Blight will showcase 2 of Keith’s hallmark metres-long drawings, aptly described by a critic as “an image with no beginning or end as the river of life, with its moments of happiness, suffering, dreams and horrors carries on endlessly.” Marked off by a Dressmaker’s marking wheel and T-Square, these drawings are sold by the metre. Also included on the exhibition is a series of “Hungry Eyes” – a metaphor for judgement developed by the artist during a residency in Paris in 2006 – and a number of small works on paper incorporating measuring tapes.
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Blight on Fine Music Radio 101.3
