MAKING PRETTY: EMILY COLE AS URBAN TOURIST

On the grey stone slabs of Warneford Street, an interestingly unresolved tributary of King Edwards Road in Hackney, someone has chalked a grid of hopscotch figures: all of them E9. Thereby making a chessboard of the narrow pavement - and, by extension, of the city. Dangerous additives. On other sites this assertion of identity, the branding war between E9 and E8, would be a tribal challenge akin to slinging a pair of trainers over sagging telephone lines. The precise definition of territorial boundaries can become a matter of life and death.
Chalk is mortal, it crumbles in the mouth. Cemeteries of ancient marine life become the quarries of southern England, sculpted into retail parks, off-highway Bluewater shopping oases. The enamel-stripping shriek of chalk on blackboard. Heritage schoolrooms where we learnt by rote, by copying meaningless formulae. And chalk was the medium of the first seascapes by Tacita Dean that I came across, walking south from Hackney, exhibited in a city bank. Chalk celebrates the possibility, the inevitability, of its own erasure. It invokes that rubbed out Willem de Kooning drawing: there and not there, always there. A smeary action-gesture of strategic removal. Chalk symbols and faked York-stone pavings, coming together in Warneford Street, demonstrate a potent urban myth. The temporary-permanent intervention of an anonymous artist and the permanent-temporary nature of civic improvement (slabs breaking up before they are laid in place).
Without this random equation how would a stranger locate herself in a constantly shifting East London geography? Old-time tramps and vagrants chalked symbols on pavings and doors, their private code: generous, mean or dog-threatening households. Now unsponsored artists sign the city. Their practice is about recognition rather than aesthetic colonialisation. You like it, you sign it. There is no requirement to bring anything home. No collaboration with the commissioning process (which has become the principal art form of the Blair era). No armature of curatorship, grant application, ludicrous explanations of future events (that will never come into being). No tyranny of political correctness. No value. Until, of course, in zones hysterical with self-consciousness, guerrilla art is puffed into cash art. Trashed buildings and disregarded walls are prepared for property speculation by the imprimatur of a Banksy stencil. And then you have the ironic spectacle of cleansing operations (compulsory in over-budgeted, upwardly mobile development areas) being taken to task for the vandalism of painting over earlier vandalism – which itself covered up some faded Edwardian trade sign for violin repairs, barbering or the cure of love’s wounds. The age of the scavenger is over and rubbish is just rubbish: unless you can persuade a gallery to give it floorspace.
Emily Cole is a product of East Anglia; born in Ipswich, educated in Cambridge, living and working in Norwich. Her car has a hook on the back to drag a trailer with a canoe on board. You see at once, by the way she navigates the discriminations of Hackney, that she is happiest with water, with parks (those ‘green lungs’ bestowed on the urban poor). The problem of positioning yourself between E8 (this season’s show) and E9 (last season’s booklet, available on request at the Hackney Museum in Reading Lane) is hideous. Emily’s London A-Z has no truck with cultural contour lines. The speed and fret of the city disorientates her. She’s willing to make a painterly grid of E8 – if she can find it. Her awkwardness with mapping is justified, original settlements grew up around natural features such as the vanished (suppressed) Hackney Brook; E-numbers are arbitrary inventions of bureaucrats and politicians carving up territory.
She suffers. On Brick Lane, a mild ruck develops between some young Asians peddling mobile phones and a man with a camera. You have to learn, very quickly, about the paranoia of image making. Cameras are more threatening than guns (which are now accessories). When Emily, struggling to get a fix on this E8 thing, this shapeless wilderness, used an old prose journey of mine as a guide, she got as far as Dalston Junction before the presence of her digital camera provoked a direct confrontation. As the whole borough has become a CCTV movie, logged on monitor screens in a former library, so the citizens – in revenge – have turned on humble analogue technology, the flash of the amateur topographer. A woman taking a photograph of a car shunt on Kingsland Road was punched in the mouth and told by the police that it was her own fault. Image making, it apears, is a more serious form of assault than some good old-fashioned GBH. Images are also property. And property, in E8, is the ultimate value. If you have it, you can’t afford it. If you don’t have it, you never will. You don’t belong and it’s time you moved out. To Dagenham, Grays or Hackney-on-Sea (aka Hastings).
The initial research undertaken by Emily Cole is in some ways the most intriguing part of her project. She wandered the streets, accosting strangers at bus stops, on benches beside the canal, and inscribed her notes on the large-format digital portraits. She did not paint from the motif or make instant sketches. She carried her photographs back to the safety and calm of her Norwich studio. The human figures – a junk dealer with a fondness for music hall, a celebrity mum with a son marooned on Love Island – vanish. They don’t make it into the final E8 grid. They are effectively banished like the lowlife that once animated Jock McFadyen’s paintings of Limehouse Cut and Bethnal Green. Personality is subsumed into place. With some relief, Emily decides to structure her work around sites the E8 denizens drift towards as a retreat from pressure, from dirt and noise. She stakes out Victoria Park, that fabulous narrative, a blot of lush greenery ceded by Hackney to Tower Hamlets. An act of pure folly forced on a hapless and indigent council. Like the giving up, by the French, of Alsace-Lorraine.
Those research tools, the digital photos and cyberspace retrievals of a virtual Hackney, are bigger than Emily Cole’s postcard-like blocks of paintings. She works in units of six: reminding me of the paving stones of Warneford Street, as if they had errupted into ecstatic colour. A ‘zingy’ acrylic base with overpainting in oil. The scheme built around lively pinks and greens. Cole’s pink is like Caladryl lotion splashed on sunburnt grass and post-nuclear brick. She decided to manoeuvre around the fixed geometry of monuments, celebrating their obscurity, the fact that they were now memorials to a loss of memory, amnesiac stalagmites. Worthy causes, forgotten battles, suspended charities: all gone, time-absolved, erased like chalk inscriptions on wet pavements.
The texture of Cole’s paint is anti-chalk, it’s strident, eye-gouging. She sets herself to redeem blight, to ‘make pretty’. The brick plinth on which Victoria Park’s damaged guardians, the ‘Dogs of Alcibiades’, sit, doesn’t appeal to her – so she fleshes it into a liquid, cocktail pink. The demonic addition, 666, gifted by some juvenile occultist, has been cartooned in Loony Toon colour. The park’s lakeside café is squished into an ice-cream cone yurt, its concrete surround rendered as a cadmium-flush beach. One of the stone igloos, removed from old London Bridge, is revamped into an arbour with a young lady perched on the bench (which the artist has tactfully restored). Here is an improved city, an arcadia wrestled from gritty particulars. An old, arthritic borough ready to be face-painted in provincial gloss. E8, in the hands of Emily Cole, is a suburb of itself. ‘Where are the green places?’ she asks me. ‘Where are the statues?’ The surreal Pearly Kings and Queens. The black marble tributes to murdered policemen. The horse troughs full of Coke cans and ring pulls.
Checking out the Alcibiades legend, the Norwich artist discovers some business about docking the dog’s tail – so she runs this conceit through to a local mutt, presented on the canal bank, beside the boho owner’s narrowboat. Cole’s E8 is ‘rescued’, returned to its bucolic origin of market gardens and grand houses with estates running down to the lost Hackney Brook. When these brightly painted panels move beyond the recording of specifics into free-flowing abstraction, they echo Ivon Hitchens. They become ambiguous, otherworldly, tunnels of wild light. Thrusting stone memorials are hermaphroditic upthrusts with mammary decoration. Fountains are dry. Nature is de-natured. The most reflective of the drawings, pitched towards sepia, like friable photographs found in a street market, are made with sump oil; a lovely marriage of grunge and water-light. Impressionist subject matter revisited in a machine age.
Alcibiades the Athenian, whose dogs have been vandalised in Victoria Park, faces smashed, overpainted with the devil’s number, was himself accused of mutilating statues. Androcles fabricated evidence against him when all the heads of Hermes within the city, perched on their plinths, were damaged overnight. The Eleusinian Mysteries had been profaned. Alcibiades, before standing trial, sailed away on a military expedition. He was a convinced advocate of an aggressive foreign policy. Statues topple, regimes change: the need remains for somebody to paint the postcards that send back hot news from the ravished city.

--- IAIN SINCLAIR 2007

Published in E8: Hackney's Heartland, Transition Editions London 2007