In Pursuit of Magic!
Verity Coward & Chantry Community Primary School
Under lamp light, assemblages of imitated limbs, anvils, eyes, rockets and teeth sit, eagerly constructed by Mrs Maynard’s year 5 class. In each work, deep reds turn darker into intense browns, shadows deconstruct form, and weight becomes misconstrued. Heavy metal objects made in papier-mâché contradict our perspectives on things as the onlooker enters into the world of Verity Coward’s new commission, Harangled, at Flatland Projects. For Verity, her paintings carry the vernacular of their material origins, yet allow their subjects to uncannily transform across multiple planes and forms of meaning.
In ‘The Artist Studio’ by James Hall, the artist's workplace has always been an imaginary as well as an actual location, an idealised utopia. (1)
The imaginary connection between the gallery space and the immaterial wonder of how an artist makes their work. I think about the romantic warm ripple of memory through which Hall (2020) tells the stories of artist’s relationships to their studios, a site of hazardous, cold, uncomfortableness which gets inverted by the delicate magic of the brush strokes occurring in situ, creating lasting acts of the magic that art makes people feel. Jeremy Deller, when talking about his book ‘Art is Magic’ (2023) (2), says that the world worries him, but for an artist that’s a good thing. When Verity entered the room at Chantry Community Primary School in Bexhill, back in July this year, students were asked to think about what they see on their everyday walk to school, in order to translate these memories into objects seen from an alternative perspective. There is magic in the act of transformation, a particular magic that occurs when art comes into the lives of children, in real life or even in books. Magic is a thing of community, it’s feels like a thing in the world we often can’t comprehend. It exists between things, a boundless energy that you can’t really see.
We are reminded within the everyday that magic in our normal lives could be real or simply moments of coincidence. I suppose many of the things you see in Verity Coward’s exhibition feel like chance; an amalgamation of brush strokes and dense colours pulling you in and out of focus. The artist has been looking at piles and mounds of awkward objects, holding the memory of local children from Bexhill. It’s magic when an artist shares what they do; whether that’s by seeing their work in an exhibition, or by seeing a photo of their studio. I do think that there is spell-binding magic in the act of inspiring, and sharing our inner worlds.
Since Verity’s visit to Bexhill over the summer of 2024, sculptures made in Sidley with the children of Chantry have inhabited the studio, where Coward has dedicated them to the inherent skill of observation. Conventions of still life meet cartoon line in Coward’s paintings and have become a ground where the artist’s world has been met with sculptural forms of the everyday for this group of children in Bexhill. This new commission by Coward offers up the jargon embedded in art speak and hangs it out to dry, it takes the confusing nature of things that become art objects and helps us make sense of our local worlds. Verity Coward in her own words has a practice of art-making embedded in material and process (looking and making), she samples and reconfigures themes from literature, fables, cartoons and current affairs to play with shifting states and satirical possibilities. What remains from the experience of Verity coming to Bexhill back in the summer is a lasting piece of magic where objects have been morphed, twisted, and skewed to archive an exchange between people and a visitor, a position of care, sharing, and representation.
Harangled at Flatland Projects is Verity Cowards inaugural solo institutional exhibition commissioned by generous funds from the Talent Accelerator, De La Warr Pavilion and Rother District Council, and has also been made possible by essential funding from Arts Council England. This exhibition runs from the 14th December 2024 to 15th February 2025. The exhibition also marks the completion of the first phase of capital improvements. These works contribute to Flatland’s mission to ensure that it can continually afford space, time, and agency to artists and communities of the region to visualise a more viable arts sector in coastal Britain. Our capital refurbishment programme has been funded by the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government’s Levelling Up Partnership programme.
1. Hall, James (2020) The Artist's Studio: a Cultural History, Thames & Hudson.
2. Deller, Jeremy (2023) Art is Magic, Published by Cheerio, London.
Text by Ben Urban
Edited by Eeshan Banerjee & Amy Mock