CLAREMONT STUDIOS CIC, 48 Kings Road, St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, TN37 6DY www.claremontstudios.org

CLAREMONT STUDIOS CIC, 48 Kings Road, St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, TN37 6DY www.claremontstudios.org

Contents

The Letter ‘Dear Gordon’ Essay - Richard Fryer Introduction/The Work Essay - Sarah.J.Lloyd Artist Information

The Letter

‘Dear Gordon’

Queens Rd, Hastings 1996.

It started with a letter, found by two artists, screwed up in the corner of a dusty new studio. ‘Dear Gordon’. It began. Actually, it started earlier than this, when the writer sat down to write a letter.

‘Dear Gordon.I know by now you are asleep but not me.I could not sleep …..’

The writer did not know, could not know, when they sat down late at night to write to Gordon that the letter would set in motion a chain of events which would lead, many years later, to the exhibition on Kings Road. The letter was written carefully in capital letters, in blue biro, on blue lined notepaper. It was read and later abandoned. It could have ended there, but by chance the letter was found again. The artists were struck by the power of the writing, by the attempt to express love, anguish and heartbreak in such succinct sentences, by the strange punctuation. They wanted to celebrate it and so they wrote it in Smartie tops. It took three years to assemble. Children helped them. They presented it in their gallery at 12 Claremont in Hastings, Dear Gordon visitors read the letter spelt out on the wall in 908 Smartie tops... ............................................................................................…………Sorry about the writing as I am crying writing this bloody note. LoveB.‘ The letter ends.

Dear Gordon/ Essay Richard Fryer

I imagine discovering the letter as it was described to me picking it up casually as a piece of litter to be discarded in the bin but first opening it out of curiosity and then becoming transfixed. It is unusual to read a letter from an unknown sender to an equally mysterious recipient. Because one knows neither party it becomes somehow, not a letter from someone to someone, but a letter from anyone to anyone. A portal through which one can view straight into another’s world. Who among us has not listened, even with relish if they are honest, to the sound of another couple having a row, through the wall of a house, out of an opened window or even in the street if we happen to find ourselves within earshot? That most intimate moment of emotional honesty where the tide has run so high and feelings become so imperative that people are forced to give vent and expose that which they have struggled to keep most hidden. Such is this letter. Such is its power. It reads not like a carefully crafted missive but like the spoken word, written with the pace and meter of a speech in a play where that play is reaching its climax. It is the final act. One senses that these two people have reached a bitter end, a turning point in their relationship. That things could go either way but that it will probably end badly.

One senses protracted pain, loneliness, anguish, and abandonment, during the weeks or months building up to this point. That this woman is not in the habit of writing letters but has been driven to do so by force of circumstance, and the desperate love she still feels, maybe despite herself, for this man. One senses that their relationship has been taken to the edge by the circumstance of separation: he accuses her of not missing him. Perhaps he has moved to Wales, maybe she has thrown him out and Wales is short hand for a local pub.

Within one sentence there are inferences of deception dishonesty violence even extreme violence and of course love, though one might be tempted to suggest that it is a love which has morphed into masochistic dependency. It is an intensely human, breath takingly honest, and deeply moving piece of writing. A lightning bolt, momentarily illuminating all the way to the bottom of the dark well of the human condition and so reflecting back at us fragments of our own selves. Of what it is to be man and woman locked in the eternal dance, the great game, the battle of the sexes. Love, not as that blissful madness that can lift us to the transcendent plain to play among the gods. though ‘B’ intimates that that was how it might have been at first but love as an unbreakable curse, love gone bad and heading for worse, love mixed in a devil’s cocktail with jealousy, violence and remorse. This letter speaks to me of sex and death and love as madness The madness with out which, most paradoxically of all neither you nor I or Gordon would exist.

Richard Fryer, builder and seafarer St leonards-on-Sea July 2014

Introduction.

A project devised and curated by Lead Artist and Project Manager Caroline Le Breton, Claremont Studios CIC.A transcript of the letter was passed on to 6 artists: Becky Beasley, Anonymous Bosch, Andrew & Eden Kötting, Rachel Finney and Scott Robertson. The artists were invited to respond in their own way to the letter with the knowledge that their work was to be displayed alongside an installation of the original smartie top piece by Jonathan Cole and Caroline Le Breton.

Alongside the exhibition Richard Fryer local builder and seafarer, Sarah J Lloyd pyschotherapist and one of the artists Rachel Finney were commissioned to write a response to the letter. “The artists have noticed and picked up the small things, the forgotten and the discarded. Finding their own voice they have each remarked on what to many may seem unremarkable and have chosen to value and to celebrate it in ways that are sometimes bittersweet, sometimes funny, but always surprising. Picking up on the things that others leave behind has produced an unplanned cohesion in the aesthetic. The show has a distinctly retro feel, rooted firmly somewhere between the late seventies and early nineties. This was a time of Smartie tops, cigarettes, and reel- to- reel tape players, photo booths, balloons and ‘the beautiful game’. Long before mobile phones and texting when we stayed up all night, wrote long heartfelt letters to each other, read them and then threw them away.”

Caroline Le Breton 2014

The Work

Claremont Studios / Gallery Layout

Becky Beasley /‘M.J.’/ ‘Astray’

Anonymous Bosch / ‘I Only Think of You.’/‘These Moments of Privacy have Past’ QRtag ‘ file contents’.

Caroline Le Breton/ ‘All My Pens’

Jonathan Cole & Caroline Le Breton ‘Dear Gordon’

Rachel Finney /’Un Parleur (All The Things That Could Not be Said)’ QRtag audio & ‘Dear Gordon Dear B’ Essay

Andrew & Eden Kötting/ ‘DEAR DARLING aka Dear Gordon’

Scott Robertson/ “Yeah, Yeah That Was Then This Is Now.’‘ Self Portrait in a Rapidly Ageing and Slightly Comedic Abstract Way’ “Nuff Said.” QRtag ‘self portrait’

Gallery Layout & Private View July 2014 Claremont Studios 48 Kings Rd St Leonards- on -Sea

‘M.J.’

Becky Beasley

‘M.J.’ 2012B/W aerial 1:1 scale photographA box of empty plastic files which the artist found on the street in London in 2002, photographed and then kept for the next ten years Imagining a possible future sculpture she might make with them. Eventually she threw them away. The acrylic frame was also found either on the street or in a charity shop at around the same time.

‘Astray’ 2014Brass cast of a found plastic hotel ashtraywith the word, ‘Astray’ embossed inGloucester MT Extra Condensed lettering.Technically a malapropism, the removal of theletter ‘h’ from the word, ashtray, brings a wildnew dimension to the object. An untimely object, the production of an ashtray in 2014 is both about loss and celebration, but also about the repurpos-ing of a type of object which, in searching ebay, one finds now regularly described not only as ashtray, but also as small pot or tea- light holder.

The viewer must make their own decision asto exactly what purpose it might serve.

Astray is a result of an invitation from the South London Gallery curator Anna Gritz to produce an edition as an aftermath to Beasley’s project, A Slight Nausea. The preparation, molding and first casting has been supported by Claremont Studios and the Dear Gordon project.

‘Astray’

Anonymous Bosch

‘I only think of you.’ 2014 A3 Digital print of found polaroid probably inscribed with song lyrics.

‘These Moments of Privacy have Past’ 2014Installation of found passport photographs, love notes, song lyrics.

This series of work responds to and investigates the use of found objects analyzing the relationships between objects and people, the act of collecting, archiving and appropriation.

QR tag ‘file’

‘I only think of you.’

‘All My Pens’

Caroline Le Breton

‘All My Pens’ 2014 ink on found paper. During the relocation of Claremont Studios to their new premises on Kings Road St Leonards on Sea the artist temporarily put her whole studio into storage. For six months she couldn’t find anything and had no access to her materials. In the move into a new studio they were re-united. This series of drawings is a celebration of colour, mark making and pens done at times when writing funding bids and pinning down project outcomes became too much. They too are love letters of sorts.

Jonathan Cole & Caroline Le Breton

Dear Gordon. 2002 908 smartie tops arranged to spell out found love-letter.A celebration and re-creation of the text of a love letter found in 1996 in a new studio, an old print works off Queens Rd, Hastings. It took three years to collect the 908 smartie tops helped by a chance discovery on the Thames Estuary of a beach made up almost entirely of plastic washed in by tides. The work was first shown in 2002 in the basement of 12 Claremont, Hastings for the Claremont Studios inaugural show. It has never been shown since but was discovered during the relocation of Claremont Studios to their new premises on Kings Road St Leonards-on-Sea. The original letter is lost but beside it is the original transcription document they used to construct the work.

‘Dear Gordon.’

Rachel Finney

‘Un Parleur (All The Things That Could Not be Said)’ 2014An audio installation using an Akai 1972L reel to reel player, three-quarter inch audio tape and headphones.

Interested in the material qualities of voice and the acousmatic the work explores the implication of voice within writing. Being unable to fully identify the author of the letter the artist has digitally vocalized its contents further dislocating it from an existing and embodied origin. This disembodied voice is returned to the physical as a three-meter long tape loop. Activated by the viewer the loop is fed and played through the machine, each time slowly destroying itself until only the internal organs of the machine can be heard and the authors voice is finally returned to silence.

QRtag Audio ‘Un Parleur’

Dear Gordon, Dear B “A texts unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” Roland Barthes (1967), The Death of the Author

The starting point for this exhibition is a letter. Since this letter was found, we are presented not only with an author (B) but an already existing reader (Gordon). As new readers we experience them as if overhearing a conversation, where our two subjects remain anonymous. As an object a letter is rather curious. Situating itself distinctly between two subjects, it is as if a letter acts as an intermediary between two parties, bringing them closer together yet causing them to remain distinctly separate.In order to express what we feel the letter transforms our thoughts into words. It is as if the letter is an attempt to distil and transform inner experience into an object that can be passed on to another. It is through the uniqueness of a speakers’ voices that what is said allows us to access who is really speaking. But who is speaking in this letter? In order to liberate the voice from language we articulate, and so we breathe life into the text. However, knowing neither Gordon, nor B, the voice that emerges is our own. It is as if the letter is an attempt to contain and possess voice, yet even when writing letters to someone familiar our voice is implied yet only ever present in the imagination of the reader. Our voice therefore exists only as an echo with an imaginative origin. For those familiar with the author of a letter, the voice that emerges is neither determinedly ‘heard’ or ‘read’. What is experienced is an inner voice, a result of the memory and recollection of the person in question. What is experienced therefore is located somewhere between listening and reading. This voice is not real, it functions in the irreal space of auditory imagination; it can be recalled yet remains elusive. This irreal voice merges with our own, causing a conflict between who is speaking and who is listening. If we begin to utter this text we give breath to writing, liberating it from the page, yet as this voice continues to merge with our own it remains incomplete, tethered between the corporeal and the imaginary.

It is as if this imagined voice exists as an uncanny hallucination, familiar yet continuously out of reach. Who do we hear, then, when the letter is not intended for us? We are presented merely with subjects, whose identities remain obscure. We are granted access to the text, yet a voice remains out of reach. It is as if the subjects appear to us, darkly, behind thick and frosted glass. The shadows of bodies are perceptible, yet their voices are muffled and lost to us as we remain ever on the margins. For us, our two protagonists remain acutely silent and their identities only partially exposed. For us, they exist only within the letter, enclosing it at each end of the page. With only the text available to us we realise the distance between our two protagonists and ourselves. The discovery of this letter, found abandoned and separated from either subject, is akin to catching the tail end of a whisper. We can recognise what it is and its attempts to express feelings that exist beyond language, yet Like hearing a whisper we cannot access everything that the letter hopes to contain. The words contained in the letter blur and fuzz in front of our eyes, obscuring their intentions from us. Separated both from its author and its intended, the letter takes on a new significance. The words within it are no longer secured by their originalintentions; they remain tethered to the letter but float around it, unfixed and without context. It is only throughthis new relationship that the complexities of the letter finally reveal themselves to us. The fundamental intention of any letter is always to be read. However, with each new reader the letter changes. Although the letter’s material qualities remain the same, its content and meaning appear fluid, endlessly flexible. The beauty of this project is that we are not only shown the complex relationship we all have with language, but how our attempts to communicate and express inner thinking will always be interpreted beyond the words themselves and beyond ourselves.

Rachel Finney.

Andrew & Eden Kötting

‘DEAR DARLING aka Dear Gordon’. 2014A sculptural work, which includes two rolls of wallpaper with hand written text on them, two tables, a chair and four cardboard tubes designed to house the texts.

All of the elements are second-hand or found objects. They have an intrinsic value or potency to them, which in no small way is down to the happenstancial nature of their discovery. The hand written texts are the only contrived elements and they are a direct reaction to an invitation to respond to a found love-letter. The work might be seen as a conversational piece in which an original text begets a response; a beck and thus a call.

‘DEAR DARLING aka Dear Gordon’

Scott Robertson

‘Yeah Yeah That Was Then This Is Now.’ 2013Glass bell jar, latex balloons, wood base.

‘Self Portrait in a Rapidly Ageing and Slightly Comedic Abstract Way’. 2013Pen on helium filled balloon. Balloon ribbon.

‘Nuff Said.’ 2014HB pencil on blank postcard, sent 1st class to purchaser. Just because we can speak does not mean we have to It’s a postcard, intended to send a message of sorts.

QRtag ‘self portrait’

‘Nuff Said.’

Dear Gordon /Essay Sarah J Lloyd

The poignant letter at the centre of Claremont Studio’s new show ‘Dear Gordon’ was found by the curator Caroline Le Breton and she instinctively saved and filed it, in her mental trove of extraordinary pieces still to be made. Le Breton’s work explores the ways in which we frame and perceive the world. She makes iconic pieces and installations, on the edges of playfulness, but very often loaded up with associative hooks, through which other more subtle oblique territories are inferred. Often she would seem to be playing on the edge of the dual rivers of language and emotion, exploring the tensions between them. This letter is full of intense emotions; they are honestly and directly expressed but entangled in troubled confusion and complexity. The dynamics of a possessive romantic love affair are clearly present, and there is a clear longing to feel wanted and valued by the other on both sides. But there is potential violence, deep insecurity in both people, and a sense of background bargaining, to avoid either having to confront their probable unsuitability for each other as lovers. ‘B’ and we don’t know here actually for sure, if ‘B’ is male or female, is obviously trying to sort things out with a lover, Gordon. Cultural stereotypes would suggest she is female, but this is an assumption. ‘B’ is fearful and pleading, but definitely sounds keen to still be close to Gordon, this is definitely not a goodbye letter yet. I found myself both moved and recoiling as I recognised the clearly toxic elements between them, the desperation to be validated even if by a violent psychopath, the need to threaten and control between them. In context this letter would normally be tucked into a bedside drawer or an old novel, hidden in a pile of unsorted papers, to be come across unexpectedly whilst looking for something else, either by ‘B’ who wrote and then didn’t send it, or by Gordon himself. But Le Breton found the letter lying abandoned on the floor of a space she rented, so we canprobably never know what happened in this story.So why is Le Breton presenting it to us? What happens when we take an intensely private letter and make it public? Is it simply voyeuristic or does it open up a hidden zone generally hard to talk openly about? Personally I think it’s the latter. The piece caused me to wonder how many of the 7 billion people currently

alive on our planet are living in a similar repetitive matrix of daily abuse, potential violence, fear and insecurity, and calling it love. So the letter has a powerful capacity to evoke for me, a very direct universal human theme, that of our desire and longing for love and attachment. It poignantly flags the dynamics of toxic unsatisfactory relationships, how sometimes any intimacy is seen as better than being alone with none at all. Le Bretons piece for me raises obliquely, an important social theme then, still under discussed in our apparently ever more right wing society. Why do we still fall into a superficial collective pattern of public ridicule towards those we see as ‘needy’, without appreciating the developmental and cultural roots of ‘neediness’ and ‘learned helplessness’. In presenting this show, Le Breton would seem to be affirming the untapped insights to be mined from closer appreciation of the messy dynamics of ordinary daily existence, when we choose to be open to seeing, valuing and sharing it, I applaud her courage in that Claremont continues to run and be active in creating workshops and creative projects for local young people, in building ongoing community resources that support their budding intelligence, creativity, self-expression and self-esteem.

Sarah J Lloyd

Artist Information

BECKY BEASLEY is an artist who lives and works in Hastings, England. Recent solo exhibitions include: The Walk...in green, Laura Bartlett Gallery, London (solo); A Slight Nausea: An Interior, South London Gallery Clore Studio, 2014 (solo live work,); Spring Rain, Spike Island, Bristol and Leeds Art Gallery, 2013 (solo). She has recently been shortlisted for the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award 2014 and will have a solo exhibition at Francesca Minini, Milan in September 2014. She is represented by Laura Bartlett Gallery, London and Francesca Minini, Milan.

ANONYMOUS BOSCH Born in the North of England, Played in several dodgy bands, Relocated to St Leonards Studied at the University for the Creative Arts. MA Fine Art. Distinction. (Canterbury) Photography BA (Hons) First Class. (Maidstone) His work has been exhibited screened and published in the UK and Internationally.

CAROLINE LE BRETON was born in Lusaka, Zambia and travelled widely throughout her childhood. She graduated from Bristol with a Degree in Fine Art (Painting) and has an MA in European Fine Art from the Winchester School site in Barcelona and a Postgraduate Diploma in Interior Design from Chelsea. She works as an artist, interior designer, curator and director of Claremont Studios CIC. As Director of Claremont Studios Le Breton has curated and managed several projects including the recent Interreg project Descouvrir/Discover which she co-managed with Christine Gist, Personal Growth in 2009 and The Art of Survival in 2010. Her sculptural work is often site specific and investigates the relationship between people and place and how we understand and are formed by our environment.

JONATHAN COLE studied at Ravensbourne, Hastings and Bristol Schools of Art before completing his masters at The Royal Academy Schools, London in 1989. He taught painting at Hastings College of Arts and Technology and co-founded both Project Artworks and Claremont Studios with Caroline Le Breton.

In 2007 Jonathan Cole was tragically killed in an accident in Cambodia at the age of 44. In his Hastings studio he left behind a large collection of work spanning more than twenty years. In 2011 an exhibition of his paintings was held at Campbell Works, London to introduce Cole’s late works to a new audience. The catalogue of this exhibition ‘Hocus Pocus’ was also produced as a record and archive of his life’s work and is still available. Jonathan’s work was last shown at Claremont Studios in May this year. His work and catalogue are for sale and all proceeds go to the Jon Cole Memorial Trust collecting funds for a future painting prize. For more information on this please contact Claremont Studios.

RACHAEL FINNEY is an artist and lecturer based in the southeast. Working primarily with sound, video and performance her work explores several areas related to the phenomenology of voice and listening. Her electroacoustic compositions make extensive use of synthesized samples, analogue processes and live performance, and are utilized for installations, live performance and recorded media.

ANDREW & EDEN KöTTING share a studio in the Old Town Hastings as well as up a mountain in The French Pyrenees. They have collaborated together on numerous works from Off Ground He to My Work His Words and This Illuminated World Is Full Of Stupid Men. They have exhibited in the UK, France, Belgium and Switzerland and this year have their work in The Towner Open. They live most of the time in St Leonards-on-Sea.

SCOTT ROBERTSON recently read that Friedrich Nietzsche had said that a “joke is an epitaph of an emotion,”. He says of his work “Perhaps that line hung around in my head because I liked the idea that it was what my work was trying to do.! It just so happened that I was reading about a comedian, not Nietzsche.

   

This project has been funded by The Arts Council Grant for the Arts with partnership funding from aGender and The Big Lottery Arts for Everyone fund.

Designwork for Catalogue by Elise Liversedge, with stripe pattern cover idea borrowed from original DG postcard design by Naomi Holdbrook.

Colophon: The font used in this catalogue is Eurostile regu-lar & bold. It has similarities to the ‘smartie top’ font used in the original ‘Dear Gordon’ artwork. The colour blue text used for the creative elements of the catalogue reference the ‘dear gordon’ original letter.

Dear Gordon Project Team

Caroline le Breton, Elise Liversedge, Nick Weekes Mary Hooper, Daniel Dowling, Naomi Holdbrook.

Youth Workshops with aGenderXaverine Bates, Tracey Johnson , Susan Lelliot, Drew Copus, Neil Warne aka Delete.

AcknowledgementsThanks to Richard Fryer, Sarah Lloyd and Rachel Finney for their thoughts and words.

Freja Wooding, Krissie Beadle and Robyn Mathews for their cheerfulness, focus and commitment during the six days they spent installing the smartietops.

Martin Everett for his installation of the exhibition.

Becky Beasley for her generosity and encouragement from the outset and her invaluable editing skills.

Anna Gritz from the South London Gallery and Laura Bartlett for their interest and generoussupport.