Summary

Naomi Salaman considers the Sweetshop Windows exhibitions over the last five years.

The Sweetshop window gallery is not really a gallery. No one comes in to look at the work, they just pass by – day or night, on foot, in a car or on a bike; by themselves or with a buggy, small children or a friend. The way people engage with this space is also different. They may not even notice the windows as they walk on past. Or perhaps it’s a momentary pause in their day; a distracted glance, long or short.  If passer by see the work, they are probably moving, on the street, travelling through their day, after something, before something else, moving in their thoughts; sad, distracted or just in a rush.

Naomi Salaman, the artist who founded the window exhibition space in Lansdown Sweetshop, Lewes, in 2017, gathers together the evolution of the front windows as an art context, reflecting on a five year project and 25 shows. Below she speaks about the project and how it developed.

Lansdown Sweetshop is a small, pre-Victorian house/shop. It’s a two up two down, with an attic and a basement. The fine wooden window boxes built around the front door are elegant, deep-spaces for showing anything up to human proportions. The frames themselves are of good design and construction. We bought the shop/house in 2016, and began to make it safe and habitable for our family. By this time I had noticed the regularity of shop front windows converted to domestic spaces around the town, and had begun to document them and develop a fantasy of using a shop window as a context for contemporary art.

I’ve been interested in DIY galleries and artist run spaces, and now I feel connected to this history.  An artist friend of mine called the Sweetshop space a durational art piece, which has made me think about it as a five year whole, and has made me appreciate the freedom I have had to make and organise work for the windows that follows a meander, no theme or financial stream – no time table other than when I can, when I have an idea, when I meet someone or have a conversation.  The last five years has seen the window exhibitions develop from an ad hoc use of the space to something more deliberate, involving my work and others, connecting to shared and overlapping spaces of interest, concern and discord that I already am familiar with or that I want to know more about.

1^st section, 241 Days  Sweetshop, February 2017 Full text here

The first show I organised was in February 2017. It was a text piece titled 241 days by an artist who published under the name Bolzem. Artist, translator and scholar, Bolzem had spent many decades studying the archives of the Russian revolution. 241 days was a selection of carefully sourced and referenced news reports and documents of events montaged together on a timeline, as they had taken place one hundred years earlier in Russia. Bolzem, aka Brian Chadwick had been given various offers of help to produce the text for radio and gallery installation, but these somehow fell through. I stepped in to produce and show the work in the shop windows, to try and achieve Brian’s idea of relating day by day to events as they had happened, leading up to the October Revolution one hundred years previously.  He handed text over to me, I printed it out on large sheets of paper, to fit the backs of the window boxes.

People passing stopped outside and began to read the texts. Confusing maybe, an energy filled chaos and clatter of events and colliding views and perspectives; none of which yet proclaimed the Russian Revolution happening, yet taken together, at this distance, were actually a record of it happening.  When I went out of the house and saw the 241 days texts hanging there – I was so thrilled. I liked the large scrolls hanging there in the windows. I loved the large print format. The window boxes became frames for the work. To me they looked grand, eloquent and historic. I look at the photos now, and can see the building looks a bit shabby, apparently some people thought it was a squat. I saw none of that then.

Passer by that stopped on the street, read the texts like ‘broadsheets’, and reminded me of Soviet newspapers put up in parks. The windows are a method of distribution – of showing, but it is not really anything like showing in a gallery, as I had known it. The work was visible from the street, it was facing the street, addressing the street. It was public, it was maybe a kind of street art, and yet it was protected, it had a frame and a context, it was not anonymous, not fly by night. It was coming from the house, so what was it? It’s the shape and remains of a shop, but nothing is being sold. Some kind of exchange is offered, at least of time and a kind of attention.  The device I had in my house, these window boxes – almost as simple and as everyday as the front door, was blowing a hole in something. And this bit of architecture still fascinates me –  with all the issues it describes and produces – inside/outside, private /public and looking/distraction/attention.

The next show came about in relation to the #We Strike protest planned for March 8^th 2018, celebrating International Women’s day and a hundred years since (married) women got the vote here. With friends in Lewes, Gill Scott and Sophie Gibson we responded by plotting a text and image piece over the three windows, using a photograph of suffragettes arriving in Hyde Park in 1913, after walking from all over Britain.  Link to #We Strike post here

Pencil on paper Naomi Salaman, Sophie Gibson (2018)

Drawing from Photographs

The scale and format of the work remained the same as the previous show – but instead of print outs from a copy machine we projected a photograph and drew on paper. We became a kind of copy machine. It seemed an obvious move to draw from photographs. I’ve done it before. It’s a way for me to think about the image and stay with it for longer. Though my work as an artist and organiser has largely been photography related, drawing from photographs has been a way to practice and document the process of looking, which has been a central concern.

From a formal and format point of view – large paper and drawing from projection is an easy and cheap simulation of a large print or photocopy, a reproduction, and yet the process of drawing renders the image knitted or fabricated by many little moves, little looks. The image is broken down and reassembled in front of you as you work, as a series of grey lines and blocks. It is quite distinct from both a digital scan and an instant optically-produced lens based image – and yet it refers to both somehow – unwittingly, as you make something that you almost can’t see – you are that close. At the same time, as you move right into the image blown-up, you come across its layers of spatial intrigue and perspectival illusion as unrecognisable flat shapes. You just have to draw what you see – not what you know, you have to unthink, and  become a kind of machine. It is quite meditative.

Whilst working on #We Strike, I sent a proposal to friends and colleagues offering the shop windows as a space to show their work – how does an artist run a gallery space with no time and no budget? I described a suggested format – three large prints or drawings hung with bull clips, and any small objects or texts on the flats of the window boxes. I set up a blog, and scheduled nine shows for the remainder of 2018. See the work here   The first five solo shows were with friends, colleagues and recent students. Though this was different from devising and putting up my own work up, worked closely with the artists, and sorted out the blog. I was adamant that the gallery ‘ran’ itself, which was not true, but was the central idea I wanted to stick to. There would be no openings or events. I knew I did not have the time or budget, or nerve to offer this kind of open public space.  By the time four more friends from further away agreed to show; I had developed clear instructions for artists at a distance. They sent through pdfs that I printed them up at the copy shop next door.

I made new work for the windows in the summer of 2018; Preparing a Lecture. This piece came about as the fine art studios emptied after the degree shows in June. I had developed a lecture, conference paper, and then an article for an academic journal on the Untitled Film Stills by Cindy Sherman. However my academic publishing career was getting nowhere. I had at least three or four articles, just sitting somewhere, waiting to be peer reviewed or being prepared for publication. And no luck with my Film Stills thoughts, it was being turned down. The amazing set of photographs that make up the film stills is much more than Sherman could possibly have known at the time of making it. In my text I describe this work being ‘produced’ by a specific community and context, rather than by a solo artist. But clearly it was not what academic journal editors wanted to hear.

Preparing a Lecture, colour prints on paper Naomi Salaman

I printed out the full set as photocopies – thinking I’d put them up in the sweetshop windows. At the same time, I was thinking about the work I had already done on this series, time spent looking and reading and thinking, writing, teaching – work that is difficult to represent, visually, but is none the less a familiarity and a kind of space. I had in my mind that famous image of André Malraux with the proofs of his book Museum without Walls.  And I began to set up a similar scene in the empty studio. My performance over the images became thought vectors and a trace of the labour – assembling this collection, and the thoughts. When I put these images up in the window, for me they made public, manifold and visible – my work with the film stills.

Malraux with proofs of his book Museum without Walls

From the end of 2018 to the end of 2019 I showed the work of colleagues and friends local to Lewes; In December 2019 with the election looming and the Climate Fridays gaining momentum in Brighton and Lewes, I put together a window featuring my long time studio manikin aka Greta Thunberg, Use Your Vote.

Winter of 2019/20 was a low point. The bad election result and the end of the pretence that the news media was ever anything other than information sculpted by oligarchs, coincided with some life, health and family troubles. I considered passing the windows on to others for a few years. No one rushed to take over, I plodded on and in March 2020 put up a work of mine from 1990 called Satellite Sex that had not shown since first made for  a group show Post Morality(1990) at Kettle Yard, Cambridge. Coming across it, every time I moved studio – I noted that the sturdy nature of the frames was probably the reason the work still existed. I thought I might use those frames again. Looking at it 2020 – in the time of another plague, and while the question of the penetration of technology and surveillance persists, the issues around censorship of pornography seem to have receded and been simply replaced by its digital ubiquity.

Satellite Sex,  1990

The next show that I made work for was in 2022. Working with Sophie Gibson, and an Ex Fine Art student from Brighton, Ash Faers, I put together Sea Shore (Temporary). Ash’s work, beachcombing a stretch of the shore in Hove where lived, she called ‘a new natural history’. Sophie and I drew the whole of Seaford Bay on three sheets. This is the place we go to swim and spend time. Weather, time and tide became the references. We spent a week or so drawing a massive heavy sky, copying a Gustave Le Gray photograph over three sheets. But we couldn’t get it to work. So we let different weather take place on each sheet. These were just ‘shots’ of the beach, which together made a vast horizon that we go into, but can never know. We added a deflated, ‘small boat’ and a pile of life jackets on the middle sheet. This is the sea we take a dip in. This is the sea and shore that people try and reach.

It was during this show, mid 2022 that I moved my home office into the Sweetshop front room. I could hear people just outside. Many people stop, and I realised this piece of the puzzle – in real time. Often they stop to take a call, have a cigarette, or to shelter from rain.  I don’t want to hang on to what people say – it’s more that outside people are in constant motion, on their way places. The windows offer a space to pause – and look – where no other action is needed, no other tariff taken. So far I had only marvelled at the shift from making the work to seeing it on the street. Now I could hear chatter, observations, questions; the sound of people passing, glancing, looking. .

Sea Shore (Temporary) engaged with multiple crises we are facing – and with the local, the here and now. It offered a pause on the street with something for everyone, especially the very young.  I heard many conversations about what very small children could see in the collected bits and pieces.

I wondered if anyone actually noticed the landscape in the background, and if that mattered. Sophie Gibson, who I work with, thought the drawings needed to be darker in tone – with more contrast. I meanwhile liked the way that the pencil marks were pale and you had to be up close to really look and see the image.

The next show was prompted by the work of local artist Karen Francesca. Her mosaics – Warning Signs –  reminded me of road signs. Sophie and I looked for dangerous roads to use for our drawing. We looked hairpin bends but were not happy until we found an ariel view of the notorious Spaghetti Junction in Birmingham. As a complex whole its engineering and design are often mentioned as an overlooked aspect of modernism. It is staggering as it is stunning. We set up and started to draw.Drawing Spaghetti Junction was laborious, but it gave us a lot of time to look at the structure and marvel at it.

My sister packed up and sent me some odd bits and pieces after the death of my dad, two years ago.  One large and bulky remnant was a full set of my grandmother’s Encyclopaedia Britannica, an edition from 1926. To use them in an installation had been a desire as soon as I knew they were coming. So what does the Encyclopaedia Britannica say about cars and motorways? Whilst Motor Vehicle is described over sixteen pages, Motorway does not yet make an entry. The decision to pile these volumes up was a response to their physical and ideological weight, and how that could be used, and thought about. You certainly couldn’t pile up Wikipedia in the same way.

In May 2023 we decided to repaint the front of the shop. The shop name has been a question from the start. And now it was wide open. We had been playing around with some options, but never quite sure, and also aware that the sweetshop itself was like cultural heritage for many locals, who all remember coming here for sweets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Working on the paint job coincided with bad news from the University of Brighton which announced the proposed redundancy of 120 academic staff. Fine art was in the target pool as was humanities and education. This meant my job was at risk along with many colleagues. This management decision comes on top of painful cuts to public art funding and art education over the last few decades. There are almost no teaching days for visiting artists in art schools any more, which means younger artists don’t get the opportunities we did, of part time work – meanwhile art schools and students no longer get the fluidity and vitality written into the changes in art education the late 1960’s, in which artists would teach art students. See the sign painting here

After realising the new sign Brighton Polytechnic , we began to work on a drawing of the art college building in Brighton, and think about its legacy, how it still holds a memory or is testament to a history of public funding of art and education. See the windows here

 

 

 

 

 

Four panel drawing of Brighton school of art

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I have been drawing from projected photographs for many years, and realise it’s a way I have to think about the image and what the image is of. That is to think about a particular reproduction, and to copy or reproduce it, whilst also thinking about what the photograph depicts. This distinction is often considered impossible – between form and content, and yet the process of visual and cultural analysis depends on it. I am interested in this paradox, and the space for reflection I have found by copying a reproduction. I am interested in the photographic, in how a single lens takes in and records light. I want to reproduce the photographic as I draw, to make it visible, and yet, as I look at and copy the projection I often cannot see the image at all… I am so close up. So questions of distance and closeness, perspective and loss of perspective, are part of the work.

Pulling together and looking again at the recent shows in the windows; Warning Signs, Seashore, and Brighton Polytechnic there is a pattern – The large pencil images we set up and draw are a response but they are also relate to lived experience and the passing of time. Responding by drawing at scale – taking time with an image of a kind of space, making it a backdrop, a context, part of a dialogue, or some kind of relating.  Initially there are conversations, with Sophie, with friends, and then these conversations land or hang on the framework of a kind of space, and when we copy a photograph of that space we document and produce a thickening of the relationship to that image or space.

Bringing together the activity of being lost in the representation, with what that space could /does might/represent or signify foregrounds the process of looking at the image…. The drawn photograph is a document of the time spent looking at it. This is alive in the windows …… and is only noted in the documentation.  END December 2023