All posts tagged Black British

Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons @ Dulwich Picture Gallery

‘…broad toothy grins…’
(Striking phrase used by the curators about Rachel Jones’s artworks)

Dulwich Picture Gallery is probably best known for hosting small but beautifully formed exhibitions by classics such as Rembrandt, amid shows about niche twentieth century artists such as Emily Carr, Edward Bawden, Tirzah Garwood.

But in a break with tradition, this summer they’ve been hosting their first ever solo show by a living contemporary artist, Black British artist Rachel Jones, born in 1991 and so a sprightly 34 years old.

Usually the gallery is divided into 3 rooms – then an intermission for the little atrium leading into the mausoleum – then 3 more rooms. For this show the 2 middle rooms have been knocked together to form just four rooms in all.

But the main point to make is that the exhibition includes a new body of work from Rachel Jones, comprising eight large-scale and six smaller works, commissioned specially for this show, alongside a selection of paintings created during the last seven years.

I counted 22 paintings in all.

Room 1. Comic abstraction (3 paintings)

The first room contains three paintings which immediately introduce you to Jones’s style, subject matter and approach.

Installation view of room 1 of Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons @ Dulwich Picture Gallery (photo by the author)

Big For a start they are huge works, enormous, standing 3 or 4 metres high, a little imposing or overwhelming in their scale.

Bright Second thing is they are big, bright and colourful, very bold, brash and fearless use of oil colours straight out of the tube and onto the canvas.

Unfinished Third thing – the dynamism of act of painting, the strokes and dazzles and sizzles of big bold paint, often leave large areas of brown canvas or linen (both are used as supports) untouched, as if the work was interrupted or, maybe, only a certain amount of actual painting was required to convey the idea, and the rest of the canvas is left blank, testifying to the sufficiency of the painting process, that just so much need be stated, and no more.

This, the curators tell us, is a relatively new development in Jones’s approach:

Her new commissions… use the weave and tone of the visible linen as a new direction in her use – and non-use – of colour. Acting as a starting point, this ‘breathing space’ adds a new sense of vulnerability to the paintings…

Abstract? Fourth thing is they appear, at first sight, to be abstract i.e. non-figurative i.e. not depicting anything in the real world but concerned with their own internal relationships of shape and colour.

Gated Canyons, 2024, by Rachel Jones. Courtesy the artist. Photography by Eva Herzog

But each of the four rooms has an explanatory wall label and these amplify and nuance your first impressions.

Felt process For example, regarding the large areas of untouched canvas, Jones explains that her approach is ‘a felt process’, that she intuits the shapes and designs and colouring as she makes the work, using it to express emotional states and interior landscapes until that expression is complete regardless of whether the canvas is covered.

The mouth Easier to grasp is what turns out to be the central motif of the show which is the mouth. Only after careful explanation in several of the wall labels did I realise, particularly in the third room, that there is something being depicted in these paintings and it is the human mouth with a particular focus on the teeth.

When I flicked through the promotional photos for the show I thought this painting was a sort of gondola in Venice and I took the horizontal ripples beneath and above it to be light shimmering on water or reflected on walls. Not a bit of it. It is a mouth, turned into a semi abstract motif, and the rectangular objects sticking up out of it, white frotted with black crayoning on the left, and pink rectangles on the right hand side – those are teeth!

Gated Canyons, 2024, by Rachel Jones. Courtesy the artist. Photography by Eva Herzog

In Jones’s own words:

‘The repetition of a mouth filled with teeth is how I play with, subdue, elevate or put meaning and content into ideas around representations of self and Blackness. It’s both specific and very general.’

And in their wall labels the curators tell us that the mouth is ‘a portal between our inner and outer worlds’, it is a symbol of our ability to express ourselves. But it – and we – exist in a social context and so Jones sets her semi-abstract mouths in landscapes, albeit highly abstracted landscapes: the self in the world; expression in a broader social context. Some of the ways you could interpret this recurring motif.

Room 2. Expression and containment (14)

Having soaked all this up in the first room, the second, long, gallery completely changes tone and scale.

There are 14 works in this room and they are (mostly) small, A4 sheet of paper size. Not that they’re regular shaped, they’re deliberately irregular in shape, with sometimes rough edging – oil stick and oil pastel on canvas or paper which are then hung a little away from the gallery wall rather than fixed flat against it.

Installation view of room 2 of Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons @ Dulwich Picture Gallery (photo by the author)

The effect is to make the space irregular, to jazz up the space, which is helped by the way the 14 works are hung in little groups or clusters, themselves making the remaining space asymmetrical.

Gated Canyons, 2024, by Rachel Jones. Courtesy the artist. Photography by Eva Herzog

As you can see from this example, again with the teeth, in fact this might be the most obvious figurative example of the mouth & teeth motif in the show.

The mausoleum

Anyone who’s visited the Dulwich Picture Gallery knows that it consists of one ‘corridor’ of long galleries which you walk along, and is punctuated half way down by the entrance to the mausoleum which houses the sarcophagi of the gallery’s founders, art dealer Noel Desenfans, his wife Margaret, and painter and art dealer Sir Francis Bourgeois.

This architectural oddity allows the curators to use this space for a variety of purposes, for example in the ‘Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking’ exhibition it had a video screen showing films explaining the techniques of print-making.

For this show it turns out that back in June the gallery hosted a live music event featuring three musicians – Afromerm, Felix Taylor and Rohan Ayinde – who created a ‘sonic response’ to the exhibition. And this soothing ambient music is played on a loop in the mausoleum, with its amber-coloured windows, thus creating a chill, relaxed little zone…

A vinyl recording of which you can buy on the DPG online shop.

Room 3. Mouth as landscape (2)

The human mouth again, stuffed with big teeth, set in swirling, multicoloured, abstract landscapes.

‘It represents a portal to our inner selves and the way we interact with, interpret and express our thoughts and feelings… The mouth has been central to her exploration of psychological landscapes, Blackness and self.’

Maybe. Although in art as literature, often the ostensible subject or motif isn’t really the point, it’s just the framework or scaffolding you need to build the real work on, which is about the style.

So in the work on the left (shown in full, above) you can really see the shape of the curved lower jaw and teeth dominating the composition but you can also see how this semi-figurative image is set in a weird and surreal, brightly lit ‘landscape. And the same goes for the painting beside it, the one I mistook for a gondola 🙂

Installation view of room 3 of Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons @ Dulwich Picture Gallery (photo by the author)

Room 4. Language is colour (3)

The final room has another three enormous works. I haven’t yet mentioned two other themes to be found in the works, namely bricks and cartoons.

Installation view of room 4 of Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons @ Dulwich Picture Gallery (photo by the author)

If you scroll up to the second image in this review you’ll see how the motif of rectangular white teeth rather naturally morphs or evolves into the idea of bricks or rectangular tiles. But bricks are notably different from teeth as symbols. The mouth and its teeth are an organic image of a human being, the self, the interface between inner and outer – whereas bricks very much represent the hard external world, the built world, civilisation.

So in the picture on the right in the photo above, you can see how a very straightforward depiction of a brick wall at the upper right is overlaid with the characteristic curve and big white blocks of Jones’s toothy grins: the organic and expressive and spontaneous overlaying the planned and objective and social worlds.

It’s an interesting effect. It crossed my mind that the show could have been arranged differently and maybe more logically to start with paintings entirely based on mouths, smiles and teeth and only introduce the development of bricks half way through – it might have helped you see it as an evolution of a motif…

Cartoons It turns out that one of her sources of inspiration is cartoons, not Fine Art cartoons by Raphael et al, American Loony Tunes, the kind which feature Bugs Bunny and the Roadrunner. Once it’s pointed out you realise the big smiley tooth-packed mouths can be seen as cartoon-like. And maybe this is related to the extremely bold and bright colouring.

Gated Canyons, 2024, by Rachel Jones. Courtesy the artist. Photography by Eva Herzog

Being told this makes you reconsider images which might have had a scary, a surreal and slightly sinister vibe, into garish comic images of madcap adventures in dayglo landscapes. In fact I got chatting to one of the gallery assistants who’s been sitting looking at these things for three months and she said the painting above reminded her of the Roadrunner, with his characteristic high-speed zigzag motion which leaves behind a vivid zigzag trail. That’s how she interpreted the sharply zigzagging lines which start at the bottom of the picture and, once they’re pointed out, do indeed carry on up to the final orange squiggle at the top of the painting.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here are some Roadrunner cartoons: note the dayglo primary colours and the unstoppable zigzag trails the roadrunner leaves behind as he zooms across the landscape.

Gated canyons

OK but what does the title of the show, ‘Gated Canyons’, mean?

When I read it, and saw the very bold bright abstract images, I assumed Jones was from America which 1) ever since the Abstract Expressionists hasn’t been afraid of enormous canvases with bold colours – and 2) is also the country which gave us the gated community – and 3) is, of course, the country we most associate with ‘canyons’ because of all those western movies (although cañon is actually a Spanish word).

The wall labels don’t actually address the issue it’s left to the promotional material to explain that the title is a deliberate oxymoron or yoking together of two contradictory ideas: canyons are natural, organic and open-ended features of the landscape, whereas ‘gated’ obviously implies human culture, closure, constraint and restriction. It sets up a binary dynamic which maybe epitomises the works’ other binaries – soft mouths versus hard bricks, figurative versus abstract, human versus landscape, high art technique inspired by kids’ cartoons.

Conclusion

To be honest I’m not sure I really liked any of these paintings. Maybe I did or maybe I liked certain elements of them, specifically the horizontal shimmers which I carried on thinking of as reflections of light on water even after I’d read that they weren’t. But I found the obsession with mouths and teeth, big grinning mouths and dazzling white teeth, a little eerie and unnerving and wasn’t totally convinced by the brick motifs. they could just as well be cells from a biology textbook and mean something completely different.

But it’s a very strong look. For some time it’s been hard to know what to do next with painting as a form – critics (and artists) have been predicting the death of painting for a century or so, but it keeps struggling on. These works show that Jones has invented something new, a new look and style which is both original and distinctive.

Maybe the best augur for Jones’s future is the sheer amount of merchandise in the gallery shop. It turns out that her boldly colourful patterns transfer very well onto tote bags, scarves, fridge magnets, notebooks, postcards, posters and all the usual merch. That’s one way of measuring success…

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by Simon on September 28, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Black art, Exhibition, Painting
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Posted by Simon on September 28, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/09/28/rachel-jones-gated-canyons-dulwich-picture-gallery/

Dennis Morris: Music + Life @ the Photographers’ Gallery

This is a fabulous exhibition by a pioneer Black British photographer who started out recording the Windrush generation of Black immigrants, branched out into photojournalism about Asians in Southall and documentary photography of white life in the shabby 1970s, before having a fabulous stroke of luck in getting permission to photograph Bob Marley on his 1973 UK tour, snapping iconic photos which turned him into one of rock’s most successful photographers, a reggae connection which gave him an entrée into the circle of the Sex Pistols whose agenda-setting tours he documented, before going on to produce iconic images of numerous other bands and performers throughout the 1980s and ’90s.

It’s a delight and a pleasure because the subject matter (the rock, pop, punk and reggae music of my youth) is so easy to process and enjoy – and because Morris is such a brilliant photographer, producer of numerous iconic photos for press, magazine and record covers.

Growing Up Black

Part of the Windrush generation, Morris and his mother immigrated from Jamaica to Britain in the early 1960s. He was given his first camera at the age of 8 and became around his East End neighbourhood as Mad Dennis, due to his preference for photography over football. After inadvertently stumbling across a demonstration by the PLO one Sunday, savvy young Dennis snapped the march then took his photos to a photo agency on Fleet Street which promptly sold it to the Daily Mirror for £16. He was just 11 years old!

He had made pocket money by taking photos of christenings and birthday parties but now he realised it could pay. He rigged up a studio in his flat (which consisted of hanging a sheet up on the wall) and started doing portraits of the community. There are ten or so of these really early portraits here and they show both his commitment but juvenile technique – subjects are a bit out of focus or not properly framed.

But he was soon branching out into street photography in the style of the great photographers he read about in photography magazines, men like Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Don McCullin.

This evolved into the project titled ‘Growing Up Black’, which includes Black immigrants in a variety of activities, shopping, cooking, kids on the street, dressing up, singing in a choir, licking a lolly – as well as the underground sound system culture strongly connected with reggae, and shots of the Black House in north London run by the controversial Michael X as a hostel for disaffected Black youth.

Count Shelley Sound System, 1970s by Dennis Morris © Dennis Morris

Southall

Having mastered the art of gaining people’s trust in his own community, Morris made the bold decision to investigate the Asian community in Southall, west London. He succeeded spectacularly, the trust he won and the access he gained and the candour and intimacy of the shots he took of Asian life are very powerful.

Man with his two daughters and his most prized possession, Southall, 1976 by Dennis Morris © Dennis Morris

The curators, as is their wont, tend to focus on the ethnicity and multiculturalism of the photos, but what gets me is the poverty and the shabbiness of so many people’s lives. If you didn’t live through the 1970s you can’t really know how rundown and derelict everything felt, and how people put up with extremely low standards of accommodation, hygiene, food and culture. Morris’s photos of Black, Asian and White life all bring back the sights and smells and sounds and the terrible narrowness of life at that time.

The curators single out the way Morris was impressed by the ‘resilience’ of Asian kids who came home from school and went straight to work in their parents’ shops. Well, I did the same. I still remember the Great Day when the register in my parents’ shop where you had to push down the money keys, as on a big clunky typewriter, to make big price labels appear behind the glass screen at the top, was replaced by a zippy new electric till where you lightly tapped the keys and the sums were shown on a digital display. Revolutionary!

This Happy Breed

Having done Black and Asian life, Morris turned his camera on the indigenous white population. If Blacks and Asians can talk about their communities and their people, then this section is about my people, lower middle class and working class white people. Morris would roam the streets with his camera, looking for subjects. A favourite destination was Hyde Park Corner with its guaranteed cohort of eccentrics.

The exhibition includes wonderfully candid shots of barbers with all their old paraphernalia and cheap scents, greengrocers filled with crates of fresh fruit and veg – I can smell the aromas of wilting cabbage and over-ripe tomatoes, I can hear the matey laughter of the shopkeeper. These are wonderfully vivid, alive, varied and beautifully shot images.

There’s a Darby and Joan club, football supporters, Pearly Kings, a gurning competition (if anyone remembers those) and that old stalwart, that reliable old subject which always shows the English at their embarrassing worst, the seaside.

On a school trip to Woolacombe in 1974, Morris took this photo of two of his teachers and won the prize in his school’s photo competition © Dennis Morris

The title is obviously a reference to the 1939 play of the same name by Noel Coward which was made into a classic British movie. As it happens I’ve read and reviewed it recently, and here’s the link if you want to find out more.

Enter Bob Marley

In a much-told story, Morris read that his reggae hero Bob Marley was going to play some gigs at the Speakeasy club on Margaret Street in Soho and so, aged just 14, he bunked off school and hung around outside the club all day hoping to meet his hero. And he did, Marley was taken by the keen young snapper and let him into the club and to take photos of the band and the performance.

Thus began a lifelong friendship and collaboration with Marley right up to the singer’s untimely death in 1981. Of their lifelong partnership, he said ‘It was much more than just taking the photos. It was a teaching, a learning, a growing’ and this comes over in the sheer number of photos on display here.

Here’s a wall of shots showing the great man lying in bed, playing ping-pong, sitting under a tree in his garden, looking over his shoulder in a taxi, and generally exuding effortless class and charisma. In Morris’s words, ‘he just radiated grace.’

A wall of Bob Marley photos in Dennis Morris at the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

Pre-eminent are three big colour prints of the shots he took at the famous 1975 concert at the Lyceum Theatre in London, one of which was used for the cover of the live album.

Some of the Bob Marley room showing colour stills from the legendary 1977 Rainbow gig, on the wall, with a display case of New Musical Express and Melody Maker covers featuring shots by Morris, in Dennis Morris at the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

What really comes over is how extravagantly photogenic Marley was, how handsome and cool and charismatic, whatever his mood, in whatever pose.

It was the 1975 Lyceum shots which made Morris’s career. In 1973 he was little known but by 1975 he was emerging as a superstar and also a figurehead for an entire genre of music. Lots of photographers went but only Morris had the access due to his established friendship. He got the best shots and sold them to all the cool mages, the New Musical Express, Melody Maker, and Time Out. From now on he was able to sell his photos not only of Marley but of a new generation of London musicians just hitting the street.

The Sex Pistols

After the Sex Pistols signed to Virgin Records in May 1977, Johnny Rotten approached Morris personally and asked him to photograph them. Morris spent the next year with the Pistols, documenting their onstage and offstage antics in depth, taking hundreds of classic shots of the band. The only photographer to put the Sex Pistols fully at ease in front of the lens, Dennis’ work with the band established, not only their public image, but also Dennis’ position as one of the most exciting and striking music photographers in the country. In the wall of Pistols, below, note especially:

  • second column, second down – the classic shot of guitarist Steve Jones (which he used as the cover of his autobiography)
  • fourth column, top – Johnny Rotten in classic pose
  • fourth column, second down – the three front men in classic pose

The wall of Sex Pistols photos in Dennis Morris at the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

Another wall has a set of images of Sid Vicious given the Andy Warhol-Marilyn Monroe silk screen treatment.

Sid Vicious given the Marilyn silk screen treatment in Dennis Morris at the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

Here’s a reminder of what we’re talking about:

Public Image Ltd

In 1978, as the Pistols broke up, Virgin boss Richard Branson invited Morris to accompany him on a talent-spotting trip to Jamaica and Morris persuaded Virgin that Rotten (now reverting to his given name of John Lydon) should accompany them. Quite apart from the reggae talent that Morris helped bring to Virgin’s attention, the reggae sound of performers like Lee Perry, the Abyssinians, Big Youth and U Roy made a deep impression on Lydon as he was assembling his post-punk band, Public Image Limited. PiL were to pioneer a distinctive sound mixing the experimental Krautrock-inspired guitar of Keith Levene with the heavy dub bass of Jah Wobble. The more you listen, the more fascinating Levene’s unconventional guitar patterns become.

Morris played a key role in not just photographing the new band, in a deliberately post-punk, anti-punk style – but crafting their public image. He created the PiL logo and designed the innovative Metal Box album packaging – as documented in a wall of images and display case here.

The Public Image Limited wall, showing stylised portraits of (top left to right) guitarist Keith Levene, drummer Jim Walker, and John Lydon looking like a choirboy – with at the far right an early version of the band’s logo: in the display case are more photos and a copy of the metal box LP – all in Dennis Morris at the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

After punk

There’s more, lots more. The story of how Morris got the image for the cover of Marianne Faithfull’s 1979 solo album, Broken English.

This was part of his work as art director of Island Records which saw him design album covers for Linton Kwesi Johnson, Marianne, Marley and many others. Downstairs is a gallery of his LP covers, as well as other rock memorabilia depicting his photos or designs (t-shirts, lighters, cigarette papers etc).

Display of LP album covers which Morris contributed images and design for, in Dennis Morris at the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

During this period Morris replaced Don Letts as vocalist of Basement 5, a reggae punk fusion band. He created their logo, image, photography and graphics and gained a recording contract with Island Records.

Subsequently he did photo shoots with a series of icons: from 1970s rock artists like Patti Smith and Grace Jones, through Prince’s heyday in the 1980s and on into the 1990s, the era of the Stone Roses, Oasis, Primal Scream and much more.

At the same time he maintained his close connection with reggae artists and the exhibition features a slideshow projected on a wall of a pantheon of reggae stars including The Gladiators, the Mighty Diamonds and many more.

And he promoted Black British performers such as Steel Pulse, Aswad, often photographing them and taking a hand in designing and styling their images and record artwork. It was Morris who persuaded Island records to sign the great Linton Kwesi Johnson, for which act alone he deserves a medal.

Summary

What range, from the poor streets of Hackney and Southall, to hobnobbing with music royalty, from the Sex Pistols to Steel Pulse, from white punk rock to the blackest of hard-core reggae, and then on to a galaxy of top pop stars. But it’s maybe those early shots, from Hackney, Southall and white working class lives from the 1970s, which linger longest in the memory…

The Trot, Southall Horse Market from This Happy Breed © Dennis Morris

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by Simon on August 9, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Exhibition, Photography
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Posted by Simon on August 9, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/08/09/dennis-morris-music-life-the-photographers-gallery/