Anthony Key - Trespassing: New & Recent Works

Anthony Key - Trespassing

Infringing, encroaching, invading, as an exhibition title, Trespassing is seemingly unambiguous. We need only reflect on the economic, political and cultural malady gripping Britain in recent years to grasp Anthony Key’s motivation for it.  Economic austerity,  the England riots,  that Referendum.  Nothing more typifies this malady, than what the current Prime Minister once gleefully described as her newly created ‘hostile environment’.

“In the UK illegally? Go home, or face arrest”, were the words emblazoned on vehicles dispatched around six London boroughs by the Home Office in 2013. In 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron referred to the hapless refugees and migrants camped in miserable conditions on the other side of the English Channel as a “swarm of people”.  The aptness of Key’s title is evident. Shamelessly deployed in the build-up to the EU Referendum, the manufacturing of a ‘hostile environment’ is not a new phenomenon. New Labour’s about turn on multiculturalism in the early noughties certainly established a framework for Brexit. However, post-war British politics have often created and supported environments hostile to migrants.    Its roots go deep into (British) history. From Thatcher’s remark in 1978 about Britain being “swamped”, to Enoch Powell’s hyperbolic Rivers of Blood speech in 1968, and further back to the racial overtones of the Conservative election campaign and victory in Smethwick, Birmingham in 1964. It is little wonder then that Key felt compelled to offer a no-nonsense summation of our times and country, when what passes for reasoned debate amounts to little more than grotesque fear-mongering about ‘swarms’, NHS ‘health tourists’ and housing queue jumpers.  

Few sculptors in Britain today deploy Key’s visual and material acuity to comment on these burdensome, vexed and often misconceived beliefs around Britishness. Trespassing brings together an illuminating collection of large- and small-scale sculptural and mixed media work produced over the past two decades. Characteristically witty and wry, Key’s practice uses quotidian symbols and materials centred on food - noodles, tea, chopsticks, ketchup, the Chinese takeaway – to explore mythologies informing constructions of ‘Chineseness’ and ‘Britishness’, belonging and difference, in contemporary Britain. Where food has come to symbolize notions of a tolerant and multicultural nation at ease with its ethnic diversity, Key’s eloquent appropriations highlight contradictions at the heart of this belief.

The title of the exhibition functions on a number of levels. It is also the name of a work produced by Key nearly twenty years ago. Perhaps this alone tells us how little the nation has progressed on matters concerning immigration and belonging. Trespassing took the form of cooked noodles, made to resemble barbed wire and intricately and painstakingly woven around a large wooden spool. This fusion creates a potent image. Positioned on a conventional plinth and innocuously sheathed within a conventional  vitrine, Trespassing also assumes the status of an artefact. But rather than a relic taken from a faraway land of a bygone age, it speaks of the here and the now.  From this perspective, the work in this exhibition represents an alternative (British) museum. Objects speak as much about the present and future as they do the past. Key provides an unauthorized and alternative language through which to understand unspoken aspects of contemporary  Britain. Trespassing conflates cultural symbols and materials, taking them into new territory, turning benign notions of multiculturalism and tolerance on their heads.

 Whilst Trespassing describes an unwanted/uninvited presence, in Key’s work, the figure is, paradoxically, almost always absent.  This is intentional. Key is too cognizant of how xenophobia and benevolent multiculturalism rely on a visible interloper or, dare I say, the ‘colourful’ subject. Instead his concern is with challenging the viewer’s perception and assumptions.  Ever resourceful, what often appear as magical sleights of hand, Key’s everyday objects are transformed into enchanting sculptures which confront the viewer.

 In the exhibition,two physically imposing works transform the status of the takeaway, playing literally and metaphorically  with the idea of absence and presence. In China Garden (2007), the takeaway is reimagined as a life-size ‘rubbing’, constructed from a wooden armature and flattened takeaway tin foil cartons, precisely tracing the contours of each and every surface of Key’s local. The interminable political obsession with quotas is wryly alluded to in Book of Numbers (2015). Rather than numbers mooted by politicians, Key refers to the actual number of the omnipresent Chinese takeaway.  It is a spectacular 65-metre construction, made from individual wooden chopsticks, intricately bound by string and partially displayed in ceremonial fashion across a 15-metre narrow plinth. On closer inspection, Book of Numbers reads as a form of commemorative ledger, each chopstick containing a handwritten inscription of the name and address of every one of Britain’s Chinese takeaways.   The spectacle presented by these works evoke an almost liturgical experience. 

The diminutive Tea Cosy (2015) and Snow Globe (2018) variously explore formidable cultural and historical iconography. Tea Cosy comprises delicately and painstakingly knitted cooked noodles, driving a coach and horses through that most English of traditions, tea-drinking. Narratives of defiance, mass production and consumerism are explored in Snow Globe, which restages the iconic and enduring image from Tiananmen Square in 1989, in which a lone protester stands defiantly facing a line of tanks, clutching his plastic carrier bags.

With Going Home (2015), Key takes a wry and somewhat stoical view of belonging. Deeply personal, it considers the ambiguity of home, which for Key has always been complicated; being of Chinese parentage, born in South Africa and living much of his life in Britain.

Meticulously moulded from wooden chopsticks into a tree stump, the work is an eloquent allegory about migration, displacement and the impossibility of returning ‘home’ to one’s roots.  Dendrochronology (or ring dating), the scientific method for calculating a tree’s age, is used here. With each passing year, the artist adds another layer of wooden chopsticks. As the tree stump continues to grow, it gets no closer to its original authentic form. Although visibly exquisite,   its palpably laden weight denotes more disturbing readings. The 2004 Morecambe Bay cockling disaster, for example,  in which 23 illegally trafficked Chinese migrants drowned,  offers an eerie spectre.  The recent government debacle, heinously identifying children of the Windrush generation as illegal immigrants, adds yet another layer of meaning to Going Home.  Even this most celebrated aspect of post-war immigration was built on shifting sands.  

Amidst all the grotesque political wrangling and political expedience which often dominates public debate, Key’s vision is a much-needed cultural interloper.   With precision, eloquence and witty send-ups,  he brings profound, often mesmerising commentary and wisdom  to ideas about cultural identity in contemporary Britain.

Richard Hylton, November 2018

Published in the accompanying exhibition brochure:

Anthony Key - Trespassing: New & Recent Works 
James Hockey Gallery
University for the Creative Arts, Farnham
8 November 2018 – 11 January 2019