The Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead

Solo Exhibition 25 November 2022 – 25 February 2023

 

This was the third of my solo exhibitions (1987 and 1999) hosted by the gallery and my third exhibition with the title of They Think They are Fallen Angels. Several bodies of work seemed to fall comfortably under this heading: my Alien Invaders, Wolfpack and Amazons. More recent works included new paintings and relief carvings.

They Think They Are Fallen Angels
This exhibition is about man’s place in nature and how we see our relationship with the rest of the world. It is often said that Darwin changed our view of ourselves, so that we accept our animal origins. We know that we are apes. Physically we embrace this concept and we are comfortable that we share a physiology with animals – after all that allows us to cure our diseases by experimenting upon them. Humans have never really thought themselves to be physically superior to other animals because it is obvious that other animals can be stronger, faster, more agile, see better, hear better and so on, but we still want to see our species as exceptional not just unique (all species are unique, just as all humans are unique). And so we elevate ourselves by claiming that our brain makes us exceptional. Our brain is an adaptation to help us thrive in the world, like the long neck of a Giraffe. Of course, our brain enables us to do remarkable things but this gives us a sense of superiority and this damages any feeling of connection with nature.  With superiority comes entitlement.  We can control our environment for better or for worse. Underneath it all humans still think they are akin to deities in the great chain of being, but they know that they fail in their noble aspirations. They think they are Fallen Angels.

Click link below for review by Nina Newbold for Corridor 8
Christine Kowal Post: They Think They Are Fallen Angels

A bit of biography
I have reached an age where I feel it may be helpful to give some information about myself because my history has been influential to my art. I have placed it here because Birkenhead and The Williamson hold a special place in my back-story.

My grandparents, on my mother’s side, were very working class. At the age of 14 my grandmother left her home at the slate quarry of Deiniolen in north Wales to go into service in the big houses around Birkenhead Park, just down the road from The Williamson. My grandfather Nathaniel Dunroe had Irish and Scottish ancestry, and worked as a red leader (painting the underside of ships with lead) at Cammell Laird, and later as a policeman, eventually meeting my grandmother one night on his beat and getting married in due course. My father’s background was very different.

He was a Polish refugee from an aristocratic family in Lwow, but in 1940 had to flee from his home in fear for his life. He joined up with the Polish army in France where he suffered heart damage, ending up in UK where he joined the RAF, but the RAF sent him to a sanitorium to die from his heart condition. However, he survived and wanted to continue his studies. His English was not considered good enough to get into a Scottish or English University, but this was not a problem for the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he studied to become a soil scientist. It was in Aberystwyth that he met my mother, when she was visiting Welsh relatives. He could not return to Poland post-war because it was under Soviet rule, his home had been destroyed, Lwow became Lviv and was absorbed into the then Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.  But the expectation in UK was that after the war refugees would return to their homeland, and so he went with my mother and baby brother instead to Nigeria (where I was born) and Ghana. He worked for 25 years as a soil scientist in various African universities, and later with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, helping to develop those countries’ agricultural systems and was awarded an OBE.  My mother died in Nigeria at the age of 43 after being diagnosed at 29 with multiple sclerosis. My father died after a heart attack during fieldwork in Africa in 1979.   

I was born in Nigeria on new-years-eve 1951, and delivered by a drunken Scottish doctor. I grew up around universities and agricultural field stations in Nigeria and Ghana. We had friends of every nationality, colour and race because the academics came from everywhere, and the conversation was all about assisting the country to improve its lot. I went to school with the children of my father’s African colleagues and was taught by African Teachers. But I was not African, and I was not part of Nigerian or Ghanian culture. My parents saw the UK as home, but when we went ‘home’ on holidays, I saw it as being somewhere foreign. My family history was all mixed up and I did not seem to belong anywhere. Things did not get better when my parents announced that we were Catholic and I would have to go to UK to be taught by nuns in a convent school. So, at the age of 10, I was packed off to a ‘foreign’ country. At first, I lived with my grandmother. She was sweet and caring, but she found it difficult, and when my sister was also sent away for her education we had to go together to a boarding school and ended up in hell. I learned that the earth was a dangerous place.

I wanted to be an artist, but my parents could not imagine a girl doing anything adventurous, and persuaded me to go to Aberystwyth to read English to become a teacher. I changed as soon as I arrived to do joint honours in Art and Italian. The art was mostly history of (male) art, but the Italian got me to spend a year at the Accademia di Belli Arti in Florence. However, when I graduated I had no idea of how to be an artist, but I managed to get jobs as a graphic artist, first in Canada and then Liverpool, and after meeting the artist Max Blond and discovering Neo-Expressionism, I eventually started with woodcut prints, which rapidly turned into woodcarvings in 1982, and this has been my main medium ever since. The Williamson, supported me from the very beginning with one of my first solo exhibitions. I still feel that I have no home, but Birkenhead (and Liverpool) are the nearest I get.