Northern Ireland
Until recently, and for well over a quarter of a century, the Northern Irish artist Tom Bevan lived in New York. Born in Belfast, where he initially studied psychology and history, he relocated to Guernsey (one of the Channel Islands off the coast of France), where he worked in a number of commercial potteries, a training that left him with a lifelong interest in low-tech casting procedures. In the 1980s, he returned to Northern Ireland, setting up a studio in a ramshackle outbuilding on a farm in the deepest countryside. There, he created a large number of sculptures, mainly assemblages made of found materials. He used concrete, clay, glass, and wood of all kinds, becoming adept at twisting, bending, and manipulating living branches as well as dead wood. One of the key works of this period was Nothing is Lost (1991), a huge assemblage of 365 boxes, one for each day of the year, which one looked at as if through a window. Each box was inspired by something he found, saw, or heard on that day, so that the work became a sociopolitical diary of a year in the Northern Irish Troubles.
After a large-scale solo show at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s then-gallery, Bevan was awarded the PS1 Residency in New York in 1993, and in New York he remained. His work, though it never lost its sociopolitical edge, mutated. He still used found objects, but collage, in combination with his own drawings and often-droll commentary, became much more important. And, perhaps not surprisingly for an artist who primarily works in sculpture, the floor became his preferred exhibition space.
Back in Northern Ireland, the works in Bevan’s recent exhibition “Serious Play,” marked a thematic return to the idea of Nothing is Lost, but in a very different key. As the title suggests, the show, with its 200 innocuous-seeming cubes, drums, and triangle-faced forms, had a double focus. Assembled from cardboard or mountboard (most of it taken from the bases of fruit and vegetable boxes), the small forms were then collaged with found, painted, and drawn images and written commentary. Though these “building blocks” may recall simple children’s toys, they also contain a very strong sociopolitical axis that demands to be “read.”
The subject matter ranges from Palestinian refugees, Ukraine freedom-fighters, sustainable agriculture, climate change, and restrictions on women in Iran and Afghanistan to standard depictions of children in comics, books, and magazines. Bevan strategically applied these images to his various cubes and roundels, their edges wrapped in decorative paper tape, to produce colorful lightweight sculptures that can be easily re-arranged by children. Any one form presents a surprisingly wide range of images and information. For example, one side of a cube contains a background of numbers, probably taken from a children’s game, along with an image of a girl in a pink and red frock taken from a comic; another image of a girl taken from a drawing found on the street in New York; and the slogan “System change, not climate change”; the whole framed by the decorative tape. And that is only one of six sides of one cube, so the permutations are vast.
Although Bevan initially positioned his 200 “blocks” in the space, children (and adults) were allowed to move them around as they pleased, so that the exhibition became interactive. The drums could be rolled along the floor—one of them had Trump facing Cornel West—and the triangular pieces, often abstract and painted in bright colors, functioned as stepping stones, linking one section and another.
It was a very clever exhibition. On one level, Bevan plays with how a child’s worldview is related to the imagery to which they are exposed. In his permutation, bright color, seemingly easy-to-digest imagery, and interaction function as entry points—to see the work in toto, you had to get down on your knees, lift each item, and turn it over again and again. What you gained was a developing perspective, one peppered with sociopolitical and cultural juxtapositions—Greta Thunberg, Salman Rushdie, Kurdish female fighters, a graph depicting rising world temperatures connected to a picture of grazing cows. For the art-minded, even Bevan’s earlier sculptures entered the mix. Some enterprising American curator should bring these works to the U.S.
