Desmond Church at the NCGA Sunderland

Artists are contrary Characters. I appear to have hit a nerve with Glasgow artist Desmond Church.
Church is currently enjoying his first UK solo exhibition at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in Sunderland.

He doesn’t seem concerned I’ve just compared his work to that of TV funny man Vic Reeves surreal drawings. It’s that I’ve suggested that the style and execution of his work is similar to the mordant cartoonist David Shrigley.

Church is clearly irked by this, “I think it’s an obvious comparison, one that I have to expect in regards of what I do, but I think it’s a lazy comparison. There are plenty of people that create simple line drawings in their art. I don’t think I have the monopoly on this.”

So, I ask, who, if anyone, influences your work? “Artists who have influenced me most are probably Jiri Kovanda, Peter Liversidge, Martin Creed”.

Martin Creed is most famous for his 2001 Turner Prize winning, ‘Work No. 227, the lights going on and off’. The installation consisted of an empty gallery with the lights periodically switching on and off. It appears Church views his art as a much more high-brow concern than I have given credit. Like I said, artists are contrary characters.

The Majority of the pieces in the NGCA show are large scale line drawings depicting the artists ideas for possible ‘interventions’ and ideas for installations and sculptures. The drawings are applied directly to the gallery walls, like post modern cave paintings, crude signifiers of our cruel times.

The artist himself seems torn between the elevated and the everyday. He recently graduated from the prestigious Glasgow School of Art with a first in fine Art yet is inspired largely by city living and the strange things he sees around him. He says, “It sounds trite but my work is inspired by everything, and in a way nothing. I just make work about what’s around me and what I experience.”

“I guess when you make work about what you experience everyday, and you live in a city, pigeons are a close runner-up on the list after people, and maybe Greggs.”

The Ghost of Martin Creed looms large in one of the works that proposes the idea for an installation in which, ‘An interesting noise coming from a darkened room that stops when someone enters…then continues when they leave.’

Perhaps Church is not quite the pretentious artist type he initially comes across as. In fact, his work is infused with a sly, mocking humour. It makes us laugh but it teases and frustrates us with its ambiguity. In the world of Desmond Church, nothing is as it seems.
I was on the receiving end of this frustration on my visit to the NGCA when I was accosted by a furious pensioner. The lady careered towards me fists clenched and spitting feathers. She grabbed me by the arm and shook it with all the might her fragile body could manage. “EEH! It bloody puzzles me! It bloody puzzles me! The lack of intelligence in these people!” Mr Church’s work is also perhaps not to everyone’s taste.

The work is funny, barbed and at times touching. There is a Woolworths sign which appears to be crying, as if mourning a loss of heritage while warning us against the dangers of consumerism.

Like the Woolworths piece, much of the work seems to serve a satirical purpose, a view that Church is keen to dispel, “I don’t have an agenda. Each individual work can have something interesting to say and together I aim to give a complete representation of my artistic practice.”

This sounds reasonable (if dull) but I can’t help feeling that given Church has just graduated and is only 23, he is holding his cards a little closer to his chest than I would like. Perhaps Church is so used to defending the simple aesthetic form of his work that he has found it easier to give a generic response when questioned rather than reveal the true nature of what he hopes to say with the work.

“While studying I’d be going into crits with ideas scribbled on A4 bits of paper, much of the time the conclusion I came to was that these works were often more successful when left in there propositional state” He says.

So what remains is the weird, the wonderful, the mundane and the laughable.
Perhaps one day Desmond Church will get to actually create some of his “little cuts into the world”. If I could suggest the first work from his sketch book, “cover plinth with laxative soaked bird seed. Display shitty plinth”. Coooo! Coooo!