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O4 May 2O21

Running from Something, Looking for Something: photographic artist Jonathan Liu drives deep into the Icelandic glacier to capture the mystery of the sublime


A dirt road stretches out into the distance. Its miles, yet untraversed, point towards mountains far on the horizon and the landscape rolls away on all sides. Here begins Running from Something, Looking for Something, a series of photographs by Jonathan Liu... read more


8 Jun 2O2O

Health Is Wealth by Katie – New York-based fashion consultant Katie Cervini is on a mission to demystify women’s health


Health Is Wealth is a new blog from New York-based fashion consultant Katie Cervini, who writes about women’s health in a way that is refereshingly human. It is an open space for conversation with tips founded on Katie’s own wealth of knowledge to help women get to know their bodies, their health and the science behind it… read more


6 May 2O2O

Isolation 2020: ‘It’s whatever you want it to be’ – creative photographer Kirsty Marshall creates a montage of lockdown messages to explore what it means to live in isolation


We are stuck, in a way the world has not experienced before, inside our homes. The pubs are closed. The nine-to-five is working from home, in furlough or redundant. The planes are grounded, the trains are empty and the cars only start when they have to. The world we knew has stopped but, for the first time, we’re in it together. For the first time, we are joined together as a planet in experiencing a global pandemic, and that is difficult to comprehend. There are almost no words for it… read more


18 Aug 2O19

John Smith, The Girl Chewing Gum (1976)


The voice over the moving image suggests there is a story to tell, as though actors are following directions around a set and therefore moving towards a common cause – that of narrative. However, as we watch the film, we soon become aware of the director’s lack of authority and control over the people, vehicles and objects that move in, through and out of the frame… read more


4 May 2O18

Recipe for Being a Woman
by Hermione Cameron


Recipe for Being a Woman is a playful and pithy debut collection from a poet whose awareness and grip on language allows her to create a concise and deeply ironic sense of being in the world. Hermione Cameron speaks of, to and for the modern age in 28 poems, in which she shows us the world anew, as if standing on our heads… read more


14 May 2O18

Darker With the Lights On
by David Hayden


Darker With the Lights On is a collection of 20 short stories by David Hayden, a prolific writer of short fiction, published by Little Island Press. With an abundance of imagination through surreal and unbounded worlds beyond and the beneath the world we inhabit, Darker With the Lights On is like taking a train in the dark, the carriage so brightly lit that you struggle to see a world you know is there, beyond the pane of glass… read more


13 Apr 2O18

Bone Ovation
by Caroline Hardaker


Bone Ovation is the debut poetry pamphlet from Caroline Hardaker. It is a slim collection of 20 poems, published by Valley Press, that satisfies an interest in myth and folklore. Hardaker’s poetry is an example of mythology as a splitting open of the present, of stories and a deep-seated connection to the past. It considers an element common to all, ‘Composite of brittle chalk and precious like the stalks of daisies in chains.’ Bone… read more


3 Oct 2O17

Paul Hawkins’
Diisonance book launch


On Friday 8 September, a curious group of people met at The Gallery Café in Bethnal Green for the launch of Diisonance – a book of protest texts, art and collaborative experimental poetry… read more


29 Sep 2O17

Crump Redivivus 
by Neil Godsell


Neil Godsell’s debut novel Crump Redivivus, published by The Voidery Aperture in 2016, is a work of contemporary fiction that experiments with language and literary form. The novel is described by its publisher as ‘a stark exploration of a life given over to the observation of other, equally unsatisfactory lives’… read more
Mark

John Smith, The Girl Chewing Gum (1976)


The Girl Chewing Gum is a 16mm black and white film by British artist John Smith, set on the cross section of Kingsland Road and Stamford Road in Dalston, London Borough of Hackney in 1976.


The voice over the moving image suggests there is a story to tell, as though actors are following directions around a set and therefore moving towards a common cause – that of narrative. However, as we watch the film, we soon become aware of the director’s lack of authority and control over the people, vehicles, objects that move in, through and out of the frame.

If there is a narrative, it is the narrative of the everyday which, it could be argued, has no narrative at all. Initially, the male voice directs the action but there is a shift when we realise the voice is directed by the action. The voice asserts a god-like omniscience as he creates the world in his own image. But he fails. This is important to expose the nature of narrative that imposes order to structure the world, represented here by a street in Hackney. But the street is disordered and structurally unstable. This affects an uncanny feeling as we realise that the action (the moving image) is out of control and, at the same time, we realise an illusion of narrative voice being imposed.

Smith takes the issue of representation one step further. The image is reality but the voice is narrative. It is usual in film for the action to be directed by the word of the script but here, in The Girl Chewing Gum, word is directed by action, as I have said. To take it further, Smith the director talks before the action occurs in order to create the illusion. Therefore, we realise that he has already watched the footage, probably many times. Cracks begin to show through the course of the film. About half way through, the directions do not match the action. The action begins to run away from control. Smith exposes what is otherwise hidden in film to create an absolute, total representation where there are no slips or fissures in the story. In popular film, noticing a continuity error is often the only way to realise its fabrication.

Smith accentuates this towards the end, playing with sound and scene in order to deconstruct a sense of reality. He shows how easily word and image can be manipulated, and how seamlessly we subscribe to false representations. The title emphasises this as ‘the girl chewing gum’ holds no more significance than ‘the woman holding the bag under her arm’ or ‘the man in the boiler suit’. We pay more attention to the girl chewing gum because of the title. We look to her for meaning but the wait is in vain. The only meaning to be found is the deconstruction of meaning; the stripping back of an image that calls itself reality. 

We have to keep coming back to the realisation that The Girl Chewing Gum is more complex because the image is reality, showing fragments of real life in Dalston in 1976. The film is a document in the archive, it preserves the past through moving image (in black and white as a result of camera technology at the time). These factors alter our impressions and associations with the past.