— Page 71

Smear Garden – Hackney artists’ exhibition

Friday 23 September from 6pm – Sunday 25 September
(during garden opening times, 11am -11pm)

“We are interested in the wild versus the cultivated (slugs and caryatids), emotional baggage, interspecies intimacy, inefficiency, and in fantasy, heart break and laughter.”

Smear Garden is an evolving exhibition of four Hackney-based artists – Claire Blundell-Jones, Stephanie Farmer, Natasha LaForce and Hermione Spriggs. They previously exhibited together in the garden of a private house in Homerton and now in this new multidisciplinary exhibition, they are responding to the cultivation of the Curve Garden with works including sculpture, print, video, drawing and text.

Dr Ben Rowson (Senior Curator: Mollusca Department of Natural Sciences National Museum Wales) will be giving a free talk in the Pineapple House at the Garden on the biology and pest control of slugs at 4pm, Sunday 25 September. No booking is required.

Image: ‘I’ll eat you up I love you so’ by Claire Blundell-Jones.

Love Dart

Love Dart by Hermione Spriggs is part of the Smear Garden exhibition at the Curve Garden 23-25 September 2016

“The verb “to dart” is not a notion I easily associate with slugs and snails. “Love”, however, maybe. I once witnessed a slug, centrally placed on a gravel path in a London park, lustfully entwining itself with a smoothly eroded piece of flint that resembled it uncannily in size and shape. I love the poorly focused 35mm snap that I took to remember the day. And in retrospect I love the overwhelming intimacy of this small-scale event, an interspecies Pygmalion, set within the everyday banality of a human city passing it by. It was only when we crouched to better observe the slug-flint chimera that walkers-in-the-park got curious and started to gather – and even then they seemed perturbed to find ‘nothing there’ on the ground where we were staring – just a slug, or a stone, or two of one, or neither.

Read the whole text

Smear Garden – Hackney artists’ exhibition

Friday 23 September from 6pm – Sunday 25 September (during garden opening times, 11am -11pm)

Image: ‘I’ll eat you up I love you so’ by Claire Blundell-Jones.

Love Dart

Friday 23 September from 6pm – Sunday 25 September
(during garden opening times, 11am -11pm)