john davies |
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notes from a small curate
updated regularly from a parish in Liverpool, UK
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June 2005
Other pics of the month - click here to see index 
The Caravan Gallery: Liverpool - Bin There, Done That from The Caravan Gallery website The Caravan Gallery tell it like it is. Well, sort of. Rather like Martin Parr tells it like it is. Englishness. Warts and all. Possibly exaggerating some of the warts to emphasise what they see as 'the real England', the England George Santayana described as 'the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humour.' The Caravan Gallery do picture postcards of all sorts of places; cards like you'd never get in tourist shops. I love them all. The one called British Wildlife which features ceramic ladybirds and varnished forest creatures photographed in people's concreted front 'gardens'; the one called Relaxing Bracknell featuring a bench entwined with overgrown thorns and another surrounded by a police cordon; and Seductive Suffolk with a photo of an articulated hay-lorry backed awkwardly into a hedge down a country lane.  I first came across them in Liverpool at the 2002 Biennial, and blogged about them here. They literally are a gallery in a caravan and it was parked alongside the rather more grandiose St Georges Hall. They risked producing postcards of Liverpool which show the place in all its grubby glory - and somehow got away with it. I've still got a stock of them and this is a favourite. Why our city council chose purple as its brand colour no-one is sure, though probably for neutrality (in an Irish city it could be neither green nor orange; in a football city it could be neither blue nor red). The wheelie bins are everywhere in the city, so the whole place really does look like this...
The Caravan Gallery are involved in the current exhibition at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, The Condition of England. They capture it well. Other pics of the month - click here to see index |