Skip to main content

Chris Ofili: The Caged Bird’s Song

Dovecot Studios

4 stars

Home is very much at the heart of Chris Ofili’s monumental tapestry that forms the centrepiece of Dovecot’s summer exhibition. Not only is Ofili’s seven-metre wide mix of classicist myth and contemporary stylings drawn from the Manchester born Turner Prize winner’s adopted Trinidad residence. This first Edinburgh showing of a work commissioned by London livery institution the Clothmakers’ Company is making a prodigal’s return to the space where it was created over almost three years between 2014 and 2017 by a team of five weavers at Dovecot Tapestry Studio.

The result across the work’s three panels finds a man and woman in repose in a fantastical island Eden. While the man plays guitar, the woman is fed cocktails from on high as birds sing in the trees. While figures at either end of the painting suggest some kind of intervention, there are references as well to Italian footballer Mario Balotelli as well as the Trinidadian pastime of keeping caged birds.

The tapestry itself is the culmination of a series of displays charting its evolution, from Ofili’s original watercolour and charcoal painting through the meticulous processes leading to the finished artwork. A documentary for the BBC’s Imagine strand did something similar, and although not included here, is available to watch on BBCiPlayer. 

First shown at the National Gallery in London before taking up residence at the city’s Clothmakers’ Hall, this welcome stop off in Edinburgh is a rare chance to witness the powerful result of a truly collective collaboration that looks at the possibilities of freedom.

Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh until 5 October.


The List, August 2024

 

ends

 

 

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more