Tainted Love :: Part Three

It was in early May that I first came across Tainted Love.
Or rather I already knew about the exhibition while it had been in its first home at Transition
Gallery in Hackney, London during the spring of 2012.
But now it was June and I was on the train to Coventry to see Corinna Spencer,
one of the artists and the curator, who’d also had the inception of the whole
idea.

And, newly installed I was interested to see how I would
react to it there, placed in a concrete and glass 1960’s built former council-office.

I’d heard of The Meter Room before and being a keen art-tweeter living in Nottingham had noticed that for a gallery somewhere outside the usual London area, that the artists who had been asked to join this
exhibition were an interesting group – whose base could have been from absolutely
anywhere in the uk.

The Meter Room is a great use of gallery studio space right in
the centre of Coventry. Looking out onto the main road only a short distance from
the station it’s easy to find. And, up a short flight of stairs I came across
Tainted Love’s second home and the lovely Corinna Spencer. She explained that
all the artists involved were people whom she thought would bring interesting
insights and also fun elements of expression to the idea of Tainted Love. A
traditionally tragic, sometimes illogical and emotive idea that seems closely connected to our
perception in understanding the fragility of pure love.

I had seen the work of some of the artists before. From Transition Gallery owner
Cathy Lomax’s The Sixteen Most Beautiful Men to Hayley Lock’s individual site specific collaboration with romantic writers set in English stately homes with (Now that would be) Telling. Which culminated at Transition Gallery earlier this year. Already hooked on Corinna’s paintings of Moss Haired Girls and her more recent Fanbook and Gems. I was
interested to see the sum of the whole.

Cathy Lomax : The Sixteen Most Beautiful Men

Gallery View : Corinna Spencer ‘s Robert and Jesse and Alli Sharma ‘s paintings including Diana Dors. Yield to the Night.

And a must-read specific Diary of Tainted Love events has been written to compliment this tour.

Corinna had made intimate spaces for each Tainted Love piece – a little
sanctuary of contemplation. With a new dimension revealed as you turned every
corner.

Georgie Flood : Shroud and Flower Eater

Hayley Lock

Corinna Spencer : Robert and Jesse

Andrea Hannon

Annabel Dover

Paul Kindersley

One of the pieces caught my eye as its presence had a slightly
different visual effect….. in as much as all you could see were columns of
tightly wrapped copper coloured thread. They offered no insight other than
their finitely woven exterior. I later found that the artist Alice Anderson had taken
objects of personal meaning and hidden them in each core, while having
meticulously and repetitively wrapped them in the fine copper thread. The only obvious differences within these columns from the outside were in their height and their
distance from each other.

Alice Anderson : 8 full photographic containers

Kirsty Buchanan

Mark Scott Wood

Jessica Vorsanger

Each piece opened a window into this world encouraging a journey.
Different ideas surrounding the expression and subsequently the viewer’s
perception of a certain kind of Love. Be
that from the point of view of the unrequited to the worshipped, the idolised, rejected, excluded or the hurt.

I found each artist took me on a slightly different and revealing tangent of
thought, within the more darker, subtle and humorous areas of how we feel love. Places I
had never been before. A journey well
worth taking.

Tainted Love is next in its final home of this year from
29th Sept until 18^th November 2012 at Downstairs Gallery
Downstairs opened in 2011 in the heritage building of Lady Pidgeon’s former Great Brampton House, Madley, Herefordshire.