Landmark Projects

To Sheppey We Did Go'
An account of the opening by David Medalla

To Sheppey we did go: Saturday, 14 August 2004: Adam Nankervis and I in Marko Stepanov's van, while other London Biennale Artists came from London in cars and by rail, including artists, writers , poets and others. As I write I am still recovering from the excellent wine that I imbibed during the performance I did in the grass-grown amphitheatre in front of the Rock House Gallery at Sheppey.

Nicole Mollett, ably assisted by Peter Fillingham and Jeanine Woollard, organised the "Insula Ovinium" events at Sheppey, which consisted of a peregrination by various artists from Rochester to Sheerness in memory of a similar voyage made in 1732 by William Hogarth and his friends. The inaugural opening held in the Queensborough Guildhall, was followed by the opening of an exhibition and performances at the Coast Study Centre in Sheerness, where a brass band played on the roof of the art-deco style building beside the river Thames while the motley guests danced and jived. I especially enjoyed seeing our turbanned webmaster Arvinder Bawa joining in a spirited jig with the many people who came to this festive event.

After 6 p.m., the guests moved down the road to the Rockhouse Gallery, lent for the occasion by Lynn and Robert (pianist and writer, respectively), where an exhibition of art works was installed inside and outside the house, including the centuries' old mews. Food and drinks were provided for the guests who picnicked on the grass among fluttering white butterflies (the exquisite summer fritillaries of England) and wild flowers. On the grounds outdoors was an installation of seashells picked from the shores of Sheppey Island by Marko Stepanov which he formed into a large square containing the image of a "scar" made from mussel-shells (the installation was inspired by Hogarth's essay on beauty, and the "scar" itself was a reference to the scar on Hogarth's head).

Nearby was another installation by Sumer Erek, of several red, blue and a pair of white poles. The poles were later used by Sumer in the performance he enacted with Katie Sollohub, a development of the performance they did together on Brighton Beach. Sumer said, after the performance, that the work refered to the inter-dependency of the Turkish and Greek peoples who live in the currently divided country of Cyprus, where Sumer comes from.

Mmmmm (consisting of Chilean poet Luna Roxas Montenegro and English artist Adrian Fisher) performed a dramatic piece entiled "The Art of War" (see picture above) on the grass-grown amphitheatre in front of the Rockhouse a couple of metres from the sea. Adrian, dressed in the military uniform of a tin-pot dictator, heavily laden with spurious medals, strutted in exaggerated goose-steps, with one hand upraised in the Heil Hitler salute, around the statuesque figure of Luna wrapped entirely, at the start of the performance, in a silken chatreuse-red cloth. Gradually Adrian (the Dictator) unravelled the cloth, on which he laid supine facing the figure of Luna dressed in a bright green see-through netting dress, surmounted by a green structure on her head. Luna, like a goddess of the jungle, gradually advanced towards the figure of the dictator, and (to the surprise of the spectators who watched the performance in silence) Luna pissed on the chest of the supine Dictator. "I grew up in Chile at the time of the dictator Pinochet," said Luna Montenegro afterwards, "and I will piss any time on any dictator anywhere".

Australian artist Adam Nankervis and I followed Mmmmm's performance with an ironic mock-rococo piece recalling the drinking bouts which Hogarth and his friends indulged in during their peregrination to the Isle of Sheppey. At Sheerness earlier that afternoon, Adam and I bought three brass Toby jugs, a rubber water bottle, a stuffed soft- toy wolf and a stuffed soft-toy sheep. We brought from London a small bamboo cage containing electronic singing 'birds'. Peter Fillingham filled the water bottle with red wine. Nicole Mollett placed a cassette tape of music played in the time of Henry the Eighth in a nearby tape recorder. "Insula Ovinium" is Latin for "Isle of Sheep" which was the ancient name of Sheppey. After pouring red wine from the water bottle into the Toby jugs, Adam and I enacted the shagging of the sheep by the wolf while the electronic birds sang in their cage on the grass. Adam offered wine from the Toby jug to the spectators which "ended" this first part of our performance.

Approximately ten minutes later, inside the mews of the Rockhouse Gallery, in front of Adam Nankervis's stunning installation of "Scurvy the Horse" (laid sick on a cot bed under a colourful blanket, beneath a large painting of a ship similar to the famous tea-clippers of Hogarth's days), beside a table full of assorted knick-knacks, Jill Rock read passages from the account of the peregrination of Hogarth's and his friends, including the story of a horse that was ridden into the Thames and delivered a message to Queen Elizabeth the First. The horse was beheaded by a furious lord, who met his death subsequently by catching gangrene when he kicked the skeleton of the horse he found on the beach. A very gruesome cautionary tale with karmic overtones. The performance ended with Adam Nankervis inscribing an enigmatic text about a snail and a horse on a weather-beaten blackboard. Inside the gallery in the old mews,

French artist Cyril Lepetit installed a video of his participation in the peregrination.

Beside it I put a white 'barong Tagalog' (the Filipino native shirt) and a sarong. During his peregrination to the Isle of Sheppey, Hogarth had many dreams, but he could not recall a single one of them to his friends. On the 'barong Tagalog', I painted what I imagined to be one of Hogarth's "lost dreams": a dancing girl from the mysterious East with her eunuch-servitor.

Congratulations to Nicole Mollett and to all who participated in "Insula Ovinium". It was a great event, enjoyed by all who came.

Best wishes from David Medalla