TOWARDS MEMORIAL and MO(NU)MENTARIES: Yuen Fong Ling

Jo Manby

A review of an exhibition that combines research into queer histories, non-permanent and live memorial with socially engaged art practice and collaboration, by artist Yuen Fong Ling. TOWARDS MEMORIAL and MO(NU)MENTARIES can be seen at Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre until 19 March 2022.

In an era when celebrity icons flare high only to be felled in an instant, when the presence of historic public statues is fiercely contested, and when even the survival of our ravaged planet seems to be spinning out of control, can anything be said to be permanent? Should anything be permanent?

Bury Art Museum and Sculpture Centre is currently showing Yuen Fong Ling’s latest iteration of a project he developed along with a team of collaborators. At the heart of TOWARDS MEMORIAL and MO(NU)MENTARIES, the two complementary parts of this exhibition, are the concept of non-permanent public memorial; pairs of sandals, both original and re-made versions; and the query ‘In a period of political and social uncertainty, how can what you wear help to express your beliefs? What you stand for, and importantly, when and where?’

Ling, based in Sheffield and with an artistic practice at BLOC Studio, was exploring Sheffield City Archives and came across artefacts pertaining to a pair of sandals designed and made by the socialist writer, poet and activist, Edward Carpenter (1844-1929). Carpenter was an advocate of equal rights for women and fashioned new ways of defining queer/homosexual relationships and identities when homosexuality was illegal. He lived openly with his life-long partner George Merrill at their home in Derbyshire, near Sheffield. Carpenter also sought to improve the living and working conditions of the working class, believing in people’s need for physical and spiritual connection with others and with nature. Hence the sandals, and Carpenter’s ethic of the ‘emancipated foot’.

TOWARDS MEMORIAL occupies the temporary exhibition space at Bury. Ling has collaborated with a number of other artists, designers, producers and makers. He has used a range of sources and media, filling the space with colourful graphics, huge trades union style banners, footage of the MO(NU)MENTARIES X RAINBOW WALK which was part of Bury Pride activities in July 2021, and the sandals themselves, among many other artworks and objects.

The visitor is given the impression of a hybrid imaginative space caught between an artist’s studio in the wake of a meeting of creative minds, and a community hall after a public protest or procession. ‘Towards Memorial’ (2019-) is a film in three chapters that documents Ling’s process of creating, gifting and wearing the Carpenter sandals, made with Picture Story Productions. The film is shown on three floor mounted screens, on the reverse of which are mirrors set at an angle to reflect the viewer’s feet as they walk by, so that visitors to the exhibition are literally welcomed to join in.

What Ling found in Sheffield City Archives were examples of other sandals that Carpenter had gathered as reference material, a small newspaper advert, photos of Carpenter wearing the sandals he subsequently designed, and paper foot patterns from his customers, one of which was inscribed with ‘Self 1892’, referring to Carpenter himself. Ling went on to explore the Garden City Collection in Letchworth, where there was an example of Carpenter’s sandal made by his collaborator and friend, the artist George E Adams.

The sandal was originally intended to ‘emancipate the foot’, as Carpenter believed that traditional footwear such as boots and clogs inhibited personal freedom and spiritual connection with the natural environment. Ling’s remaking of the sandal was achieved by pooling these various resources and artefacts and using the ensuing body of knowledge and insight to create a contemporary design using modern materials. Ethical shoemakers Noble & Wylie (formerly Guat Shoes, established in Sheffield in 1978) were engaged to handmake them, each pair stamped with the identifying, commemorative ‘Self 1892’ and the dates ‘1844’ and ‘1929’, marking the years of Carpenter’s birth and death.

The MO(NU)MENTARIES part of the exhibition examines the idea of public memorial in Bury’s permanent collection, using a new commission of a pack of postcards to highlight re-presentations of sculpture and two-dimensional art works converging on themes of feet, footwear, protest and public space. The commissioned postcards refer to selected artworks and artefacts from Bury’s permanent collection, Bury Archives, Sheffield City Archives, and Local Studies Library. MO(NU)MENTARIES also embraces Ling’s artworks My Days with Edward Carpenter (2016-), Towards Memorial (2019-) and The Human Memorial (2020-). The postcards were made to be worn in the shoes of participants in the RAINBOW WALK. Ling explains that the idea for the MO(NU)MENTARIES postcards occurred to him when he had all the resources and research to hand, but no idea where to start:

‘…I decided to put some postcards of Carpenter in my shoes and began wearing them out… And then after time, when they wore in, and I forgot about them. I think a memory of someone, that is no longer in your life, can be like that. When you eventually take the postcards out, your feet, their personality, has transferred itself onto the postcard, like mini sculptures, and we can read so much into it.’ (Artist, Yuen Fong Ling)

It was this that led to the participants in the Bury Pride RAINBOW WALK wearing postcards in their footwear. Some, along with members of Bury Council’s LGBTQI+ Employee’s group, were recipients of pairs of the ‘re-made’ sandals, gifted by the artist. This provoked the question, ‘Can a pair of sandals be a form of public memorial when they are worn?’

The recipients take up the strands of Carpenter’s life and ideologies in their own activism as they stand up for the fight against injustice and the oppression of others, including LGBTQI+ rights and sexual health and equality in the workplace. The original recipients of Ling’s re-made sandals were The Friends of Edward Carpenter, a group of enthusiasts and activists with the objective of commissioning a permanent public memorial to Carpenter in Sheffield City Centre.

The worn postcards are used to filter the re-presentation of the permanent collection gallery at Bury through the themes of feet, footwear, protest and public memorial. In the centre of the gallery, classical male and female busts and statuary are arranged around a stand-off between a maquette of Bury’s Peel Monument by Edward Hodges Baily and a disembodied David’s foot, a working cast after Michelangelo that was used to draw from in Bury Art School. As the exhibition’s information points out: ‘nimble youth and agility triumphing over authority and institution.’ On the walls, a range of two-dimensional works from the collection have been selected and labelled with the worn postcards.

There are a wealth of nuances and thoughtful references here. John Faed’s The Cruel Sister (1901) hangs at adjacent sides of the entrance to its queer reworking made in 2017 by artist Jez Dolan and friends, in the form of a staged, gender-fluid photographic print. The small watercolour A Welsh Peat Gatherer ([18]52) by Paul Falconer Poole (1807-1879) shows a highly romanticised image of working childhood, the young girl apparently taking her ease on a gently sloping bank, a creel held on her back by a headband. The fact that she is barefooted is celebrated as idyllic, belying the harsh reality of rural poverty at the time and the sheer punishing graft of what she is actually doing.

However, there is a fine balance: Henry Scott Tuke (1858-1929), Charles Sims (1873-1928), and others, like Poole, roughly contemporary with Carpenter, convey a sense of spirituality and escapism in painting ordinary people in a natural environment, channeling the same kind of ideals that Carpenter sought with his concept of emancipated feet. In his luminescent watercolour of a group of partially dressed young men splashing about in a boat on a river on a sunny day, Tuke’s vision is surprisingly homoerotic given the conventions of the time he was working in.

Throughout both sections, evidence of Ling’s collaboration with Jon Cannon that led to the graphic brand and logo concept, ‘SELF 1892’ emerges, extrapolated from off-cuts of the paper prototype sandals. The resulting large paper shapes in rainbow colours become integral to the ‘cut and paste’ feel that the artist intended for the whole exhibition. As Ling told me, this was about ‘capturing the essence and atmosphere of the studio space, the cutting board, the easel structure, the experimentation, and the potential of that space. When you reveal the making of an object, it opens up the space of demystifying the history, and actively constructing meaning.’  Ling further explained: ‘My “meaning” was how spirituality and sexuality were expressed through a sandal, and how it could connect to a history of homosexual oppression and invisibility, versus LGBTQI+ activism and visibility.’

In TOWARDS MEMORIAL and MO(NU)MENTARIES, painting, sculpture, film, artefact, photograph, archival document and designed object are collaged together into a glorious celebration of personal freedom, equanimity and well-being, unified by the radiant spectrum of Gay Pride. Ling has attended to every detail in this meticulously researched, eulogistic exhibition, where even the information panels in the galleries are spelled out word by word in consecutive rainbow colours.