Just a couple of days ago, when discussing the numbering system Yan Tan Tethera (see here), I mentioned my languages teacher at school, the late Richard Gendall. 'Dickie', as everyone knew him, was a folk singer and songwriter, a passionate supporter of Cornish identity and culture and was a major player in the revival of the Cornish language. His son Phil was one of my very best friends at school and we played in a band together. Phil was into all the same things as I was - notably art - and went on to create a successful graphic design company that aims to promote local culture in a positive way. Pick up any brochure for a Cornish attraction and Phil's hand is probably involved somewhere.
But now, here's that coincidence ...
Two days after writing about Dickie Gendall, I see an article in The Guardian newspaper all about artist Georgia Gendall - Phil's daughter and Dickie's granddaughter - who has done something extraordinary by creating an annual arts event in Cornwall based on, of all things, worm-charming.
I'll quote directly from The Guardian article here:
'Worm charming – or grunting, or fiddling – is an age-old art and an established competitive sport of several decades: a notched wooden stick is scraped close to the earth, the vibrations mimicking the rhythms of rain to bring worms up to the earth, where they are harvested for bait. But on this bright blue Sunday afternoon in Cornwall, traditional methods pale in comparison with the unconventional (and it’s a peaceful operation: all worms caught will be returned to the wild). The teams file in to the festive sound of Gweek Silver Band and unload their arsenals. There are instruments, watering cans, graters; a musical saw, a lime green foam roller, papier-mache seagull feet; country dancers, croquet sets and one woman who produces an entire mini cocktail bar, her silver shaker her tool, its spoils perhaps more of a motivation than the official artist-made prizes.
The artist behind all this is Georgia Gendall, 31, currently wearing a pink hi-vis with “WORM JUDGE” sprayed on the back. Worms have long been part of her art, she explained earlier in the week, over tea in her studio, a static caravan on a farm on the beautiful Roseland peninsula, and she hopes that the contestants come away with a new respect for them.'
“They’re amazing, but they’re really absurd,” she says, over an hour’s lighthearted but thoughtful conversation. “My work always has that balance between something very normal and very absurd, mashing those things together.” Her studio chipboard walls are laden with work, such as a functioning kinetic sculpture made of biscuits and pasta that uses Jammie Dodgers as its turning cogs and a pink, Barbara Hepworth-like sculpture with a hole in it that is actually a cow’s well-loved salt lick.
'Agriculture and rural life is both a theme in Gendall’s work and her reality. Moving from a conventional studio to the farm, where she also works as a gardener and seasonal shepherd, reshaped her outlook. Last year’s lambing season – with her hands lodged in “intangible places, a bodily experience of learning with touch” – pushed her towards gooier materials, exploring in-between states and natural degradation. Toothpaste has become one medium, after one striking morning of sitting at the sharp end of a sheep having just brushed her teeth, lurid pink insulation foam another. “I particularly suffer from picking materials that shouldn’t really be used for art, but that’s part of it,” she says, her knuckles flecked with soil. “It reflects the impermanence and ever-changingness of life.” (Almost perfectly on time, a bit of spaghetti falls off the biscuit sculpture.)
She not only subverts pastoral art, but specifically the popular image of “Cornish” art, still caught between the 20th-century St Ives school and endless commercial seascapes. Gendall, who was born in Cornwall, mentions the salt lick, one of several first shown at the brilliant group exhibition Thanks for the Apples at Falmouth Art Gallery in 2021. “For me they interrogate the idea of Cornish art because they look so much like something that would have been carved in St Ives, but they’re licked by cows – and they are Cornish art because they’re licked by an animal that is part of the ecosystem,” she says cheerfully. “It’s sort of sticking two fingers up at what’s expected.”
Her work is also about queering the landscape. Rural areas can be “challenging for people who are queer because they don’t find it an accepting environment”, says Gendall, who lives nearby with her girlfriend, also an artist. “Actually I feel most myself here, I feel released by it.” Recently she realised that the way her work flips familiar things is about “embodying queerness. I want to make everything look at something from another angle, which really is my experience of being queer in the world. That’s been a revelation.” Though ultimately, she says, “all I really want to do is make people go ‘huh!’ and have a good time.”
She couldn’t have pulled it off better than at the Worm Charming Championships. Although Gendall sees it as part of her art because she sets the parameters, “everyone has this little space to do exactly what they want for half an hour. And that just doesn’t happen in this world.”
Gendall attended Central Saint Martins but returned to Cornwall after five years in London. She set up an art space in an allotment, which helped her find a local community of artists, and says can make work here that she couldn’t elsewhere: “You’re afforded that permission through belonging through time.” At the same time, she finds the romanticised idea of making art in Cornwall far from the realities of the local housing crisis. “It’s about pushing preconceptions of what it means to live and work here, try and find space here. Most of the people I know live on boats, in sheds, caravans, vans on the coastal path. It’s a really complicated place.”
What a fantastic idea.
Full article is here.
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