Art reviews: Tai Shani | Georg Wilson | Florence Peake | Lindsey Mendick
Children of a certain age will love Tai Shani’s giant sleeper, writes Susan Mansfield, but as a metaphor she’s problemmatic
Tai Shani: The Spell or the Dream, Jupiter Artland, near Edinburgh ★★★
Georg Wilson: The Earth Exhales, Jupiter Artland, near Edinburgh ★★★★
Florence Peake: To Love and to Cherish, Jupiter Artland, near Edinburgh ★★★
Lindsey Mendick: Growing Pains, 15 Reform Street, Dundee (Jupiter+) ★★★★
Traditionally, Jupiter Artland shuts its doors from autumn to spring, but the park has made the decision this year to open through the winter. Already it’s a new experience, seeing familiar sculptures surrounded by autumn colours. However, there are also three new works (or bodies of work) to entice the visitor from their winter burrow.
Winter might be a time to think about hibernation and sleep, so it’s an appropriate moment for Tai Shani’s The Spell or The Dream to arrive at Jupiter after six weeks in the courtyard at Somerset House in London. Shani’s giant sleeping princess in her glass box in the orchard, her skin a pearlescent blue, could have come straight out of a fairy tale, long silver-blue hair tumbling over her shoulders, lacey gown lifting just enough to reveal big blue feet.
Her glass casket does look a little too much like a coffin, but one must linger long enough to see that her chest is moving gently. Maxwell Sterling’s soundtrack seems to pulse and breathe, too. She is The Spell, and visitors can tune in to the companion work, The Dream, a 24-hour programme broadcast on digital radio, which includes newly commissioned sound works and new and archive programmes on the subject of sleep and dreams.
There is a certain magic about her, that’s for sure; I suspect children of the right age will adore her. As a metaphor, she’s a bit more problemmatic. The fairy tale, after all, depends on the princess waking up. The idea seems to be that the figure sleeps through present catastrophes and dreams of a better world. One could argue these issues are best wrestled with during our waking hours.
There’s also a mythical quality to the paintings of Georg Wilson, who graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2022 and is already showing internationally. This commission, in the Ballroom - where it is immediately enters into lively conversation with the ornate plasterwork on the fireplace and ceiling - is her biggest to date, and was made after a stay at Jupiter Artland in the summer.
Wilson’s work reflects the seasons in the natural world, and these have a sumptuous, summery quality. Eschewing ideas of landscape painting per se, which, as she points out, was historically about the visual representation of land ownership, she aims for a more earthy, immersive approach to nature. The human figure who appears in her work - naked, ungendered - seems to long for that immersion, digging their hands deep into the soil, letting beetles crawl over their skin and birds peck worms from their shoulders.
Wilson’s skilful painting speaks of a familiarity with art history - indeed she has a degree in it from Oxford. She paints well and with an exacting degree of detail: the beetles which crawl out of her paintings onto the wall are rose chafer beetles; a plant is cow parsley and, in another work, its deadlier cousin, hemlock. It’s a kind of anti-romanticism, as if the human were expressing a desire to be subsumed by nature, to disappear into it and become part of its greater cycle of life, death and rebirth. It’s an intriguing proposition from a strong, new, painterly voice.
The latest permanent commission for Jupiter Artland is on the floor of the Glasshouse, a new space to be used for events and weddings. That last thought was much to the fore in inviting Florence Peake to create a performance which, in turn, created a floor painting.
Peake choreographed four dancers who frolicked, embraced and kissed, covering themselves and everything around them with paint, in the performance during this summer’s Jupiter Rising, leaving the Glasshouse floor an explosion of colour.
In the weeks which followed, Peake worked with it, retaining the essence of movement, the uncontrolled splashes, but pulling it back from abstraction, accentuating or defining the marks made. Limbs, bodies and embraces started to emerge from the mess of colour. It’s this balance of spontaneity and control which makes it interesting to spend time with, as well as entirely suitable for the floor of a wedding venue.
Meanwhile, Jupiter+, the park’s education and outreach programme which takes art into town centres around Scotland, has this year revealed a new commission by Lindsey Mendick in a former estate agents in the centre of Dundee. Mendick’s Growing Pains explores the challenges of adolescence in relation to home, the contradictory pressures on young people to gain parental approval while at the same time break out to forge their own identity.
Mendick’s work in ceramics is outstanding - she won the Sky Arts Award for her superb installations at Jupiter in 2023. The centrepiece of this work is a series of model houses, decaying suburban villas which open up like dolls houses to reveal not rooms and furniture but the detritus of adolescence: trainers and gaming consoles, alcopops bottles, cigarette ends, Nokia burner-style phones. In some of them, arms and legs seems to suggest a figure trying to break out.
The houses are awkwardly installed in a kind of spiral; you can walk among them, but gingerly. Skilled as they are, I wonder about them as a portrait of adolescence: are they too generic, while at the same time a little out-of-date? No teenager today, after all, would be seen dead without their smartphone. But this is not your adolescence or mine, it’s Mendick’s.
What brings the work into sharp focus is the film, you couldn’t pay me to go back, in which the artist returns to Muswell Hill in north London, where she grew up, for the first time in 15 years. Visibly moved, she points out the spot outside school where she and her friends sneaked cigarettes at break time, the doorways where they got drunk on vodka they’d persuaded an adult to buy them.
Her painfully frank narration brings us right into how horrible adolescence can be: the risks taken, the pressures imposed, the desperate need to have the the right stuff, the right friends, the right body; the kind of toxicity which led Mendick to swallow pills as a teenager in an attempt to take her life.
She doesn’t offer nuggets of wisdom to today’s teens, just her own raw, authentic experience, and a driving passion that others might be saved from repeating it. I’m not young enough to guess what today’s adolescents will make of it, but I hope that intense, heartfelt hope will at the very least hold their attention.
Tai Shani: The Spell or The Dream will be at Jupiter Artland until September 2026; Georg Wilson: The Earth Exhales until 1 March; Florence Peake’s work is permanent. Check www.jupiterartland.org for winter opening hours. Lindsay Mendick: Growing Pains, runs until 21 December.
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