Almost Nothing
But Blue Ground
Opening
5 April, 18:30
Free entry
rsvp@forma.org.uk
Exhibition dates
8 - 19 April
Tuesday - Saturday
11:00 - 17:00
Performative Lectures
13 April, 14:00 & 17:00
45 minute performative lecture with 25 minute discussion
Featuring post lecture conversations with guests Richard Court, artist and resident gardener at Forma’s Peveril Gardens and John Hunnex, Curator of British and Irish Herbarium at The Natural History Museum, respectively.
Free entry. Capacity is limited so booking is essential. RSVP does not guarantee entry. We recommend arriving early to secure a space.
Cyanotype Workshop
6 April, 10:00 - 14:00
Hosted by the artists, this workshop will cover themes such as the restorative potential of the garden, the life and work of Anna Atkins, the cyanotype process, Sir John Herschel, the transatlantic slave trade, colonial botany, ideas around the decolonisation of museum collections, public access to land, and the Victorian fern craze. The workshop will take place in Forma’s rooftop oasis, Peveril Gardens.
£15
Print Edition
The Brick, 2024 (Edition of 15)
£55
Shipping from 5 April 2024.
Press Information
For press queries please contact:
jon@forma.org.uk
Almost Nothing But Blue Ground
Tom Pope and Matthew Benington
8 - 19 April 2024
Opening Friday 5 April, with Performative lecture
Cyanotype Workshop, 6 April, 10am - 2pm
Performative lectures, 13 April, 2 & 5pm
Initially developed at FormaHQ, Tom Pope and Matthew Benington’s performative lectures return to the space, this time accompanied by an exhibition of archival material, objects and collaboratively made cyanotype prints. Almost Nothing But Blue Ground interrogates the Victorian fern craze, land ownership, capitalism, and the colonial project, through the lens of pioneering Victorian photographer and botanist Anna Atkins.
Anna Atkins, who was both a pivotal figure in the history of British photography and a direct and indirect beneficiary of colonial exploitation, produced the first book that used photographic illustrations, ‘British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions’ in 1843. Almost Nothing But Blue Ground focuses specifically on Atkins’ later book ‘Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns’, which was created collaboratively with Anne Dixon in 1853. Many of the ferns included in the book were from Jamaica - testifying to the fact that Atkins’ husband and father-in-law jointly owned at least eight plantations and thousands of slaves in Jamaica.
Almost Nothing But Blue Ground uses research, socially engaged strategies of making and dialogic modes to explore the links between botany and the plundering of foreign lands. The exhibition presents archival material, objects and collectively made cyanotypes, which are activated as illustrative exhibits in a series of performative lectures. Many of the exhibited materials were collected during a performative week-long walk that Pope and Benington conducted in 2021, when they travelled on foot from Atkins' house in Tonbridge to Dixon's in Ferring. On the journey, Pope and Benington dragged a trolley that carried photographic darkroom equipment and served as a table for them to create, socialise, and discuss the impetus of the project with people they met along the way.
Tom Pope and Matthew Benington, 1%, Cyanotype, 2021. Courtesy and © the artists.
Tom Pope and Matthew Benington, Exclude, Expel, Extract & Extinguish, Cyanotype, 2021. Courtesy and © the artists.
Tom Pope and Matthew Benington will present two performative lectures at FormaHQ on Saturday 13 April. Following each performance the artists’ engage in conversations with the audience and invited guests: John Hunnex, Curator of British and Irish Herbarium at The Natural History Museum, and Richard Court, artist and resident gardener at Forma’s Peveril Gardens.
Roger Griffith MBE and Caroline Douglas have both made written contributions to the project, and a new text by Zakiya Mckenzie will be launched in tandem with the exhibition at FormaHQ. These texts will also be incorporated as audio readings into the performative lectures. A cyanotype workshop on Forma’s rooftop Peveril Gardens will take place on Saturday 6 April, and Pope and Benington’s new edition The Brick will be available from Forma’s bookshop, Presse Books.
Antonia Shaw, Head of Programmes, Forma:
Forma prides itself on supporting interdisciplinary artistic projects from conception to presentation, and champions work that engages with complex histories and realities. We are thrilled to support and present Tom Pope and Matthew Benington’s new work, Almost Nothing But Blue Ground, which criticallyexposes and fosters conversation around British colonial histories.
Pope and Bennington’s installation will be the most immersive exhibition we have presented at FormaHQ to date. The artists devised the performative lectures at FormaHQ in 2022, taking over the building to test and develop the presentation of their work. We are delighted to welcome the artists’ back to Forma and be the first London venue to present Almost Nothing But Blue Ground in full, before it continues its UK tour.
Almost Nothing But Blue Ground will travel to 12 venues over the next 2 years, including: Natural History Museum, London, May; Original Projects;,Great Yarmouth, 15 June - 21 July; Kingston Museum, London, 16 July - 10 September; Big Old Gallery, Tonbridge, September - October; Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, 6 November.
The performative walk and touring exhibition is supported by an Arts Council England Project Grant. The development of the performative lecture has been supported by Forma.
Print Edition
The Brick, 2024 (Edition of 15)
Created specially to coincide with the Almost Nothing but Blue Ground exhibition at Forma. The print takes its name, The Brick, from the term the immediate area around the old Bricklayers Arms (1844-1963) pub was known as. The pub is a place of socialising, rest and community which is particularly important to this area with its history of pilgrimage. The print sees an image of the Bricklayers Arms placed within a network of Melianthus Major and Kniphofia ‘red popsicle’. Both species, selected for their medicinal benefits, were collected from the Forma rooftop garden. The organic matter forms a network that could be perceived as a community of people where knowledge, history and stories are shared.
To preorder, visit Presse Books online or in person.
Artist Biographies
Tom Pope works in performance and photography. Play is at the core of his practice; it is both subject matter for his works but also embedded in how he utilises the photographic medium. In 2011 he won the Deutsche Bank Artist Award for the project Time Bound. Recent projects include One Square Club, at Frieze Art Fair Los Angeles, a performance work and the world’s most exclusive private members club; Art Workout an online exercise video and participatory performance commissioned for Frieze New York online; and Terminating Martin Parr, a live performance where he destroyed 17 Martin Parr photographs. Pope has work in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, National Museum of Wales as well as various private collections. Pope lives and works in Hastings.
Matthew Benington is an artist specialising in printmaking and photography, working with themes of collective memory, gender, and land ownership. Notable projects include Hide: The Apocryphal Archive, an immersive folly lined with etchings of his own displaced family members and Hide, a sculpture set within the permanent collection of Tremenheere sculpture garden. Object to Image is a series of large-scale installation of images within architectural folly’s. Ideas about ruination, public monuments, and the repurposing of former industrial spaces inform his curatorial work with Unstable Monuments, ACE, Truro, 2016 and Unstable Monuments Bristol, a residency and exhibition in 2022. Matthew lives in Norwich and runs Year 2 of the BA HONS Fine Art at Norwich University of the Arts.
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Lead Image: Tom Pope and Matthew Benington, Kett’s Oak A1243, Cyanotype, 2021. Courtesy and © the artists.