One Year On: The Wolverhampton Riots - Sally Payen

In August 2011 the streets of Wolverhampton erupted into violence and disorder. Sally Payen has been commissioned to respond to the events of last summer through paintings and drawings using CCTV, newspaper images and social media as source material. Her previous work has touched on the subject of anarchy and unrest and gives a fascinating insight into the way that people behave in crowds. I visited this exhibition to see Payen's work and was struck by such an intimate yet powerful body of work in the gallery spaces of the Wolverhampton Art Gallery. Here are my thoughts which I wrote at the gallery. Notes on Wolverhampton Riots: One Year On – Sally Payen Stepping in to the gallery was both intimate and powerful; within the space, fragments of the event unfolded, taking siege of the audience in a space.

Ring

I liked the way the figure (?) in the foreground melts under duress from the effect of being overpainted, imposed upon by a new figure. The scene has a translucency to it, a sense of a moment that has passed, a fracture of despair. It is a fable that is retold but in the retelling, changes mutate into something beyond the original actions. An enlightenment and a lens. Generally the colours in the paintings intrigued me because they have a muted, soft tone except for flashes of cerise or red. It reminded me of paintings from the genre of Romanticism. Tintoretto colours. It challenged the raw, gritty and violent scenes that were relayed via the media during the events. I like the ink drawings on vellum very much. I enjoyed the spatiality of them, the way the paper sucks up the liquid and wrinkles slightly, disturbing the surfaces which reflected the consequences of the physical nature of the events. My own perspective of the riots was seeing the events from a 360 degree vision from transmitted images, yet never being there or directly involved. I don’t know the back stories, the intricacies of lives that were battered or reduced to rubble, before, during or after the riots. The work

Riot

has a biblical connotation for me, like a scene of figures clustering around an apostle. One of my favourite pieces. Anna Falcini 2012