Review by Anneka French
As one might presume from the title, Communion is a quiet and highly reflective exhibition. Featuring work by three early-career artists, Leah Hickey, Jamal Lloyd Davis and Tomilola Olumide, all based within the Black Country of the English West Midlands, it forms one of the key outputs of an artist development initiative called Blast Creative Network convened by community arts organisation Multistory. Here shown at The New Art Gallery Walsall, itself a stalwart of artist development programming, Communion draws together themes of the body, grief, health, faith and care. The exhibition makes connections across and between the three artists, with each showing a small group of new or recent works in a range of media.
Hickey, based in Walsall, describes herself as ‘an artist led by heartbreak’. Indeed, the works shown are underpinned by her grief for her father, and are manifest through Talisman (2024), a small vinyl bumper sticker positioned low on the wall, Private View, a large-scale oil on satin and three floor-based sandstone sculptures reminiscent of burial markers. Each make use of text in the distinctive Gutenberg typeface, which, because it lacks easy legibility, means one must spend time deciphering each word with care. The historic typeface is utilised to put forward messages of protection and resistance in language that also feels archaic, or, in the case of the hand-engraved sculptures that form part of a series titled Offering (2022-present), messages of a gentler resilience in the face of adversity. Made by Hickey in collaboration with a local stonemason, Offering is informed by family mythology surrounding Druidic ritual and poetry. Talisman, meanwhile, ‘maladapts’ Biblical verse and everyday encounters with other people’s grief with a darkly humorous note of incongruity. The rendering of Private View picks up on the precision of the stone cutting, placing a fine outline of flat black paint around the perimeter of each letter while carefully building up their centres with heavily textured, tar-like marks. The oil stain that bleeds out on to the white satin ground, casting a near-circular halo or a greasy smear, imbues the work with further ideas of pathos and spoiling. Hickey’s works feature an absence that is almost palpable.
Nearby, Jamal Lloyd Davis, a British-Jamaican photographer and filmmaker, presents black-and-blue (2024), six blue cyanotypes and one colour photograph positioned adjacently. These self-portraits, the first that he has made, are shaped by the artist’s experiences with anxiety. His downcast eyes and his face in his hands deliver a tender and impactful punch. The drips, splashes and washes of the substances in the alchemical cyanotype process that have been left visible offer both textural and emotional layering. Tiny details such as individual strands of grey hair catch the eye, the blues shift in tone, and there is both repetition and subtle change within Davis’s body language. The title of the series refers not only to music and to psychological challenges (feeling blue) but also to the physical, by dint of connections to bruising and healing. Words inscribed in capitals on the surface of two works offer poetic accompaniments to the visual, connecting with both Hickey’s and Olumide’s works and their respective interests in writing. The colour print, meanwhile, shows Davis in a position of bold defiance, staring down the lens of the camera, apparently making eye contact with the viewer, his camera front and centre and of utmost importance.
Work by Nigerian artist Olumide includes two series on fabrics and a suite of enamelled works on copper plates. Exhibiting an array of technique, form and media, Olumide’s works are held together by colour, pattern, play and a certain sensuality. These themes can be seen in the luscious enamel surfaces and tiny symbols of Passages (2024), arranged on the wall in a grid formation, almost like a deck of cards. With motifs including an aeroplane, cowrie shells and a round form that might be a sun or a moon, in addition to more abstracted forms and patterns, these brightly coloured miniatures contain huge narrative and symbolic capacity. Colour is also key to the sublimation-printed marbling in oranges, pinks and blues that become backdrops to the text-based works from her ‘Slow down | Se jéjé, Choosing Self, Reckonings of Joy’ (2023-2024). The three prints on polyester fabric feature poems written as odes to joy, rest and self-care, all too important reminders to breathe slowly and to value oneself. These texts are earnest, heartfelt and exploratory. A third series of work, Erekere (2024), its title taken from the Yoruba word for ‘reckless play’, is made using batik, a wax resist dyeing technique. These three works of lilac-grey canvas depict outlines of the artist’s hands in a free experimentation of pattern and material, foregrounding the physical presence of the artist’s body in a similar way to Davis’s self-portraits.
Blast Creative Network is rooted in a desire to support emerging artists locally, to offer spaces to collaborate, grow and learn that are both impactful and accessible. Multi-stranded, free and including dialogue, writing opportunities, fundraising support and this new annual exhibition programme titled Assembly, which is devised in partnership with The New Art Gallery Walsall, it affords sorely needed critical development for artists outside of formal education and within a culturally under-resourced geographical area. The fact that Davis’s work is soon to be platformed in the upcoming exhibition REFLECTOR, on The New Art Gallery Walsall’s fourth floor (26 October 2024 – 9 March 2025), as part of a separate 10-month national artistic development programme for photographers of colour, this time steered by the Gallery in collaboration with GRAIN Photography Hub, is testament to this crucial and timely need.
The open call for Blast Creative Network’s exhibition opportunity, Assembly 2025, is live now.
