Julian Perry was born in Worcester and studied at Berkshire College of Art & Design and Bristol Polytechnic. He has lived and worked in the east of London for twenty-three years and has a studio close to the Olympic site. Much of his work concerns the relationship between the modern, urban world and the natural landscape. < ...Read more
Julian Perry was born in Worcester and studied at Berkshire College of Art & Design and Bristol Polytechnic. He has lived and worked in the east of London for twenty-three years and has a studio close to the Olympic site. Much of his work concerns the relationship between the modern, urban world and the natural landscape.
Shed 54 and Rhubarb Diptych is one of a series of paintings made by Perry in response to the 2012 Olympic developments in the Lea Valley, which formed the exhibition 'Julian Perry: A Common Treasury' which was shown at Austin/Desmond Fine Art in 2008. In the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, he observes:
‘In the rebuilding after the Fire of London and after the Second World War, the street patterns were largely preserved. The impact of the 2012 Olympics will be less forgiving … As the scale of the impact became apparent, I wanted to respond with images symbolic of a community and landscape making way for the Games.’
The title, 'A Common Treasury', refers to the 1649 manifesto of the Diggers, or True Levellers, who were protesting equal rights in the cultivation of land, thus ‘levelling’ the social order. ‘In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury, to Preserve Birds, Beasts, Fishes …’
'Shed 54 and Rhubarb Diptych' is the largest painting of the series and Perry regards it his chief statement on the subject. It combines, in one remarkable image, a painting of one of the sheds alongside the huge, leathery leaves of a rhubarb plant. The ramshackle Shed 54 is depicted with great realism yet it is isolated against a featureless background. By doing so, Perry’s intention was to avoid sentimentalising the structure whilst giving it a convincing presence in two dimensions. The idea was, in fact, to treat the building like a still-life.
Perry’s use of both sheds and rhubarb brings him into a long line of artists investing apparently commonplace objects with metaphorical significance. The shed, for instance, has iconographical significance in Christian art as the scene of Christ’s birth. The rhubarb, on the other hand, refers to Albrecht Dürer’s watercolour ‘The Great Piece of Turf’ of 1503, which focuses on an isolated patch of vegetation.
The Common Treasury paintings are part of a long term project, which began with Perry taking photographs of the cement works, chemical plants, breakers’ yards and canals. Using Google Earth, he has checked the precise location and angle each image was taken from so that he can return in 2012 and record the altered landscape. It was whilst undertaking this reconnaissance work that he became fascinated by the range and variety of garden sheds found on the allotments. As Martin Postle wrote in the exhibition catalogue, ‘the sheds stand collectively for the evolution and survival of a community against the odds.’ < Hide