aaaaagh!!! (art): June 2013

Thursday, 13 June 2013

Scott Polar Research Institute hosts Paul Coldwell

Just seen the work of a guy called Paul Coldwell tucked away in the Scott Polar Research Institute. The building is on Lensfield Road in Cambridge, a mere undergraduate's throw from the centre of town. Coldwell is a printer and sculptor and is a professor at Chelsea College of art. Thinking back I understood where the prints were coming from, technically and conceptually. The show kind of skulked around at the back of the museum, almost blending in with all the other evidence of the art of chilly exploration. Cool glass copies of personal artifacts, small scale sculptures. Post cards, fateful last letter lines to loved ones. Not blast you away art, but quiet, lyrical and visually poetic. This show could possibly be the last thoughtful artistic response to the entire tragedy of Scott's slip sliding away to his frozen oblivion. Not to mention his colleagues.They literally froze to death. Upon recovering their corpses a simple slip of a sturdy rescuer's grip would have resulted in the shattering of an arm or leg. So yes, the exhibition was a thankful and considerate whisper to the memory, not just of a time ,which history and myth tells us was historic evidence of some class based British superiority wet dream, but to the struggle of some real flesh and blood striving for survival in the the coldest temperatures known to the human species. The Scott myth is essentially a literary one, jazzed up these days with interactive gubbings all over the place. Coldwell's show however takes us away from the National Geographic school of heroic challenge and into a quite contemplative area. The artist's objects matched their environment.

A later viewing kind of confirmed what I had thought about the show. The students that I took mostly considered the exhibition and the Scott Polar exhibits as a blended experience, with no real demarcation between Coldwell's work and the exhibits that reside there normally. Mostly I consider this a good thing , the added art enhancing the meaning and the cognitive resonance of the already poignant displays and the unexpected intimacy of the letters which Scott and his men wrote when they were dying. This aspect is covered in a small but effective series of post cards simply entitled, "For God's sake ,look after our people."

paul coldwell is the link to go to.