A Modest Show: Fayre Share Fayre at The Whitworth

Charu Vallabhbhai

A review of Fayre Share Fayre curated by A Modest Show director Nathaniel Pitt, on show at The Whitworth until 4 September 2022. From signs for lost nations, broken dreams and spilt milk to keyhole glimpses onto contemporary life through food, writer and curator Charu Vallabhbhai negotiates a democratically selected exhibition that extends its offer to all who enter.

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines the word fayre as ‘an old fashioned spelling of fair, used to talk about the type of food served somewhere’. Collins Dictionary provide four alternative definitions for fayre, which they interpret as is a pseudo-archaic spelling of fair or fare. One of these four is ‘…a gathering of producers of and dealers in a given class of products to facilitate business…’ such as ‘…a book fair’. Taking these terms and their descriptions, the Whitworth exhibition of Manchester artists’ work (presented in parallel to three installations from the British Art Show 9 programme) can be interpreted as an art fair offering samples of different types of contemporary objects in a range of media including painting, drawing, sculpture, moving image, text works, textiles, photography and possibly more.

Art fairs are a fashionable business these days, luring the rich and glamorous to hang out in, quite often, a stifling tent, and trudge from one stand to the next (as opposed to stall).  In my experience the sellers offer no sales patter.  Smartly dressed, nodding, perhaps my attire indicates that I’m not wealthy enough to engage with for the potential of a sale.  

It’s therefore refreshing to visit an art fair in one single space, with no dividing partitions, that offers an expanse of floor in a room within a beautiful public art gallery. The wares are for visual consumption rendering a transaction with no sale, and the exchange of money for goods replaced by a benevolent act of giving, repeated for each visitor to the space. There’s no special treatment for those dripping with money, no back room behind a curtain for your wealthy eyes only. The exhibition can therefore be compared to a soup kitchen or food bank, offering nourishment to all that enter.

Almost all the works in the show are wall mounted, even those that are three dimensional, enabling a democratised salon hang that reflects the reference to fairness of the exhibition title. Statements regarding disparity, between those who have and the have nots, are distributed evenly on the gallery walls, offering a political sharp edge as running commentary. Scottee, in his text work The Legacy of Poverty (2021), draws on statistics to support this assertion that ‘POVERTY IS NOT A CHOICE MADE BY THE INDIVIDUAL, IT’S A DECISION OF THE STATE AND THOSE WHO ELECTED THEM.’ The words, in red, emphasise Scottee’s plea to ‘STOP MAKING PEOPLE BLEED FOR THEIR SUPPER’.

Scottee’s chosen materials of peg board with letters, numbers and punctuation would often be seen at the chip shop or greasy-spoon, listing the menu. They recall places associated with serving up the humble worker’s meal. Meanwhile the colours black, red and white reinforce the sense of social responsibility in this artwork, harking back to the 1980s and movements such as Red Wedge that brought together musicians with more than a left-leaning collective conscience. Why does it feel like so little has changed or that we have returned, full circle, to the dilemmas that should have long been buried and left as remains of the 20th century?  Or is this complaint simply no more than SPILT MILK, as suggested in the positioning of Andrea Booker’s gleaming, found and reclaimed sign of 2009 that once had a different life and context to give it meaning?

Criticism of our current government reappears in Hilary Jack’s work at the opposite end of the room where Corruption (2022) takes the words of political activist George Monbiot, developed into a dual channel work presented on twin screens. ‘Corruption runs through this country like words through a stick of rock’ is the quote of 2020, taken out of context, that could be interpreted as an ambiguous outcry regarding the state of the nation. Jack explicitly links that condemnation to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in office since July 2019, and his government. Words and moving image loop and transfer from one screen to the other, recording a red, white and blue stick of seaside rock that crashes to the ground and shatters, separated from its wrapper and label that float down gently moments later. The label would ordinarily bear a photo of a national seaside treasure, Brighton Pier or Blackpool Pleasure Beach, but in their place is the face of the man we know as BoJo.

Long gone are the days of glory in our Iron Lady, whose descendant has baffled the nation as he stumbled and bumbled from one crisis to another. Inflation is rising at unprecedented levels to such extent, it’s hard to image who, in these days of doom and gloom, Raimi Gbadamosi’s advice Starvation is a cure for pickiness (2006) is aimed at. However, for Gbadamosi, of Nigerian origin, starvation is a reality that affects many in the continent of his family ancestry. Many of us remember the famine that struck Ethiopia in the mid 1980s but most are far less aware that in 2020 Action Aid reported that 264.2 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are undernourished and actually suffer from starvation. We gallery-goers are offered a stark reminder of a very different context to that in which our western-world woes reside.

In CC-CP (2020) Leo Fitzmaurice takes the brand identity of British institution the CO-OP and replaces the middle letters ‘o’ with ‘c’. In doing so he has created a sign for a lost nation, as the CCCP is translated into English as USSR. Fitzmaurice is thereby conflating Soviet communism with the British cooperative movement.  The brand identity of the ‘clover leaf design’, first introduced in 1968, has been readopted by the Cooperative Group since 2016. An interesting fact local to Greater Manchester is that the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers is recognised as forming the basis of the modern cooperative movement and also that the Cooperative Group’s archives, that hold the original hand-drawn ‘clover leaf design’, are located near to Manchester’s Victoria Station. The letter forms for the Co-op logo allow for this exchange of characters to be barely noticed, an act of subversion replacing an icon that represents Britishness with the Soviet enemy. We are presented with a three-dimensional object akin to cold war counterespionage in plain sight, perhaps only really signposted when the art object’s title is listed in the exhibition hand-out. There the transfer of letters are more distinguishable. 

At the opposite end of the room is a pseudo blue plaque, made in clay by Horace Lindezey, commemorating television presenter David Frost (2021) for his role on breakfast television whilst the nation, including Lindezey, ate their cornflakes and drank their tea. The object references British culture three-fold, the English Heritage blue plaque, breakfast television with David Frost, tea and cornflakes at the start of the day. Chester Tenneson honours the humble Marks and Spencer Sandwich (2020) with the rainbow colours we associate with the Pride flag, listing the ingredients of a BLT filling with an exotic, possibly spicy, guacamole twist.

Liam Ashworth spells out Stir Fry (2018) with great success using a light source to capture the words drawn in air, caught by the slow shutter speed of a camera and rendered in print. The question of how many seconds it took to write these words and the number of attempts for them to be legible are unknown. Pat Flynn’s selection of Cheeses (2015) takes samples with red, yellow and black waxy rind in the form of wedges to create a photographic homage to Mondrian’s abstraction, to minimalism, cubism and… cheese.

The words that form statements in this exhibition almost act as punctuation marks within a sea of images, of, about and related to food. The ocean itself is alluded to in the positioning of Jamie Holman’s Sea Fruit (2020) and Ruth Murray’s Fishes (2022), once home to these items abandoned by the tide or pulled out in nets. Whilst Holman’s neatly assembled grid of shells conforms to modernism on different levels, retaining a decorative element that is thrown in the interruption of pattern (is this in fact a game of strategy?), Murray’s painting draws back to a tradition of painterly surfaces and observation of still life, with its symbolic references to fragility and mortality. Hung above is Robin Megannity’s Fruit (2020) depicting delicate pears, peaches and plums. Perhaps an ode to Autumn as they lie on a rusty coloured tablecloth, sumptuous in hue.

There are threads of colours and letters that weave through this exhibition to form a tapestry, a little like Bayeux, telling a story of the 21st century. Not an epic tale, but one made of fragments that offer keyhole glimpses onto contemporary life through food.  After all, we are what we eat.

In Charu Vallabhbhai’s last review for the Fourdrinier, of ‘Drawing In Breathing Out’ at Rogue Artist Studios, we announced Mike Chavez-Dawson’s ‘text-Rorschach’ lucky dip. All the submissions were excellent, but we are delighted to post here the winning entry and the new owner of Mike’s original monoprint, text-Rorschach (2022):

‘The warrior stood with a calm simple grin, ethereal wings extended, his towering spear, helmet pointing to the gods in which he so fiercely believed.

Above him angels danced and sang his praises. Victory is theirs.

A celebration.

Peace has been won.

The warrior can now rest.’

 Lucy Whitehead, Altrincham