Greenhouse at Set Woolwich a group show curated by Ben Raz and Jean Watt, opened in the UK

Installation shot at SET Woolwich. Featuring (above) part of Tarzan Kingofthejungle’s Untitled 1- 11, 2024. Hand-carved gypsum ceiling tiles, 60 x 60cm each. (Left) Maya Levy, Fields, 2024. Bullseye glass, newsprint, 51.5 x 40cm. (Right) Ben Raz, Column, 2024. Oil on linen, 48 x 65.5cm, photo by Studio Adamson.

By ESME BLAIR August 22, 2024 

‘Greenhouse,' a group show curated by Ben Raz and Jean Watt, opened on the 26th of July on the 4th floor of art studios high rise SET Woolwich in South East London. The Greenhouse is filled with living things and ornaments, protected from the outside as an entirely constructed mimicked interior environment of the modus vivendi. Gardens and fine art have plentiful cross contaminations– perhaps now a waning practice, a knowledge of horticulture was a very common pursuit in the West at the turn of the 20th century.^[1] In the quickly regenerating industrial surrounding area of Woolwich, the exhibition grappled with contemporary perspectives on nature; its lack, its governance and its whim.

Emily Webb’s paintings depict a sleek dark wet shape emerging from grass in Weaving the big map, and disappearing into it in Fluid exchange. The aeroplane-like form is central to the dilapidated environment, the unwieldy greenery encroaching on it like hair - this dark glossy mound, a shark egg or a bygone concorde disappearing into the soil, both contributing to and polluting the life around it.

Office architecture is typical of many art studio spaces in London, the language of which is employed by Tarzan Kingofthejungle in his Untitled 1-11 which features a series of carvings into white gypsum suspended ceiling tiles. Viewers can delight at viewing the mundane square tiles as though we are looking up at the intricacies on the ceiling of a place of worship. The carvings depict goat and sheep footsteps, fishing tackle, mining gear, a usb; items at home in the average suburban garage, equally evocative of some kind of localised adventure. Tarzan noted they behave like stock stand-ins, as props from stories stripped of any context and detail.

Ben Raz, Monarch Chrysalis, 2024. Acrylic and oil on velvet, 41 x 60cm, photo by Studio Adamson

Co-curator of the show and painter Ben Raz’s Monarch Chrysalis transfixes via a kind of morbid victoriana. Painted on a vampiric purple velvet, the chrysalis is deep in sumptuous sleep. The work was placed next to Raz’s Column– a monochromatic look under the hood of a pink orchid, the eternally sexualised flower, painted here being prodded by a french-tipped finger, and another provocatively unadorned one poking from the other direction. The orchid becomes the stage on which a symbiosis is being enacted. 

DON’T GET LOST by Lucy Neish is an almost to-scale work of a lone rabbit ear on a bed of grass. Placed opposite Webb’s dilapidated meadows, this painting has a similar sombreness- it’s quiet. Though on canvas, the surface texture of the painting is ruggedly textured, adding to the atmosphere of the matted terrain. Though somewhat macabre, the scene is intimate and tender. 

Don't Get Lost by Lucy Neish
 

Annie Metzger’s ludically shaped Dragonet 3 utilises found wood with a bouncing rounded edge framing a plasticine scene which is pressed into the surrounding wooden walls, as Raz remarked, like gum on the underbelly of a school desk. The indentations of the finger marks into the malleable plasticine describe an expansive pastoral landscape confined to the small plywood pen, each length about the size of a standard school ruler.
 

Natalya Marconini Falconer, Untitled, 2024. Mild steel tray, hand blown glass, Fiat 500 hubcaps, cast aluminium fennel and fennel husk, aluminium pulley, thread, fennel seeds, pumice, 91 x 91 x 241cm, photo by Studio Adamson.

Flexuous punctured metal smacked onto the wall complete with cavorting ramp, ball and propellor makes up  Bo Sun’s Hidden essentials. Though stationary, the swooping sinuous metal prongs which drop beneath the mounted sculpture making up the ramp summon kinetic interaction. Likewise, the purple ball which rests at its base looks as though it wants to be flicked, as much as the wings of the propeller above it invite being blown on. The thought of these central elements moving however would risk being too akin to a kind of overt cuckoo-clock-esque contraption a la Rowland Emmett. Instead, the playful features are decidedly still, donning the curious sculpture a poise despite its visual similarity to playground architecture. 

Antonio Parker-Rees’ Search Party has us looking through a compound eye– like that of the fly in the pasted picture on the work’s surface. We squint to make out the myriad of swirling colours beneath the transparent textured plastic. The image’s frame bends and points outward, evocative of eyewear which contributes to the awareness of the work’s affect on our field of vision, while providing the wall-mounted sculpture a pleasingly abnormal concave pointed star shape.

Fields by Maya Levy features layered image work– a paper aeroplane is balanced delicately behind the pale indigo bullseye glass which simultaneously blurs the view of a black and white image of some indistinguishable insect. The murkiness to the glass gives the notion of the image and the paper plane being embedded like a fossil, the separate elements thus becoming consolidated into a consummate object. 

The only textile work in the show Oscar Crabb’s Seeded is a matted grassy wall hanging in off-white adorned with familiar patchwork pattern flowers we would see on quilts made for or by loved ones. The varying sized ‘flowers’ in brickwork greys and browns glimmer like hairy stars in an inverse cream coloured sky.

Reading like the inner pages of a newspaper, Raphaella Pester’s Sediment is an impressive feat of geometrical paintwork. The pattern warps and sways so that there’s a sense of freestyle chaos we know will never defy the regiment of the grid paper it’s painted on. This being so, the application is in places uneven- some outlines spill out, resisting perfect straight edges, introducing an ageless charm in human presence which would be lacking if the systematised graphic image had been generated digitally.

Kirin Crooks’ Untitled painting is a jubilant employment of colour. The scrawling charcoal at the bottom of the picture acts as a kind of dark foundation to the pinks whites and reds which shoot up as well as float down from the top of the painting, giving the work a vertical thrust. There is a kind of central clearing in the painting evocative of a sheltered glade in the middle of a woods bringing a resounding calm despite the energetic brushstrokes and colour palette throughout.

Natalya Marconini Falconer’s Untitled
 

Perhaps the most sonic piece, Natalya Marconini Falconer’s Untitled floats a few centimetres above the floor, a number of Fiat 500 hubcaps are placed atop the square steel tray resembling cymbals. The laid-flat yellow hand blown glass has a delicate ripple to its surface– as if it’s buzzing from sonorous surroundings. The aluminium fennel and fennel husk act as anchors lying outside of the square frame, simultaneously adding a surreal tangibility to the work which consists otherwise of nondescript square and circle forms.

Gillies Anderson Semple’s Aalto and Aalto 4 are both prints on aluminium, resembling the marred industrial surfaces we witness in public space. In contrast, the images themselves are of a lamp and chair, as well as a mat and ajar door– calming snippets of interior life. Atop of the prints are randomly placed freshwater pearls which take a moment to decipher. They introduce a mystical element as well as being a time-honoured, naturally recurring resource which the perfectly cut rectangular aluminium plates contrast by their industrial precision.

Placed daringly on the window sill of the exhibition space were Coco Crampton’s ceramics Spooler, Can and Downpour, looking over the ledge from fourth floor height. In the context of ‘Greenhouse’ all three works appeared watering can-like due to their adornment with looping tubes resembling handles or spouts. However their nature as glazed ceramic makes us all too aware of their fragility, denying the utilitarian vessel-like propensity that their forms suggest.

So long, farewell Auf Wiedersehen, goodnight I hate to go and leave this pretty sight by Enzo Randolfi is centred around a tall metal ribcage, the form of which is constructed from a familiar array of spikes and repetitive railing we are used to seeing fence off a building, balcony or park. The structure is adorned with various cords, doilies, ribbons and radiator tape. A number of counterfeit robins sit atop of the metalwork vying to be admired. There are nods to everlasting English kitsch which embellishes the somehow equally nostalgic towering industrial construction.

Enzo Randolfi, So Long, farewell Auf Wiedersehen, goodnight I hate to go and leave this pretty sight, 2024. Mixed media, stainless and steelwork with faux robins, 240 x 300 x 500cm, photo by Studio Adamson.

The show was accompanied by Jean Watt’s piece of prose 2005 which describes a reminiscence on a greenhouse from childhood and some distressing encounters with dead animals. The text ruminates on sweaty spaces; greenhouses at Kew to saunas and nightclubs, how we react to places inside and out with varying levels of comfort and fear across child and adult-hood. Functioning as a kind of backbone to the show, the piece cultivated a child-sized access to the imagination, in turn aiding viewers see the works in the exhibition with a pair of wide inquisitive eyes.  

“We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces.”- Lady bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

We can think of the Hortus Conclusus, the Latin term for an enclosed garden, implied to be something private- so private that the walled off garden or yard was often used as metaphor for the Virgin Mary’s womb. The garden in this instance is seen as a designated area in which to view an accomplished and personal world. Akin to that of the enclosed greenhouse, it’s an apt comparison to the viewing of a work of art– the four sides of a painting designate that which is within; a curated world. With sculpture and performance it could be the gallery itself which is the greenhouse; we look through brittle panes of two dimensional glass at a complete realm, curated for viewing. The greenhouse as a model for an exhibition was a likewise meditation on each artist’s own access to nature- a move away from it as expansive or sublime, rather an acknowledgement of when it is small or personal. Each artist in the exhibition was rather different to the next, nurturing their artistic practice in each their own way like a committed gardener cultivating life in the greenhouse as the condensation settles around them. WM