Gapado Artist in Residence One

Plastic Magnolia, 2022
Material: Pigment Inkjet with wax on Photo-Rag
Size: 150 cm x 100 cm

This image is based on a work by the British artist Paul Nash called ‘Flight of the Magnolia', a late work that features what the artist called ‘aerial flowers’. His painting depicts an unfurling magnolia blossom in flight, suspended between clouds and the sea. Both the fleshy folds of the magnolia’s rounded petals and the seascape behind are realised in a pastel palette of pinks and blues, creating the impression of delicate dawn light.

In Hughes's work, flowers are substituted with the ends of plastic bottles collected on the island, blown ashore from the seas around China, Korea, and Japan. The interrelationships between air, clouds, and the sea are part of the processes of evaporation and circulation systems.

As we now know, plastic waste exists at the macro and micro levels, it’s in the air, in our bloodstreams, and in the sea, and it too is now part of the circulatory system. By using a delicate pastel colour palette, Hughes aims to use a kind of heightened form of attentiveness and synaesthesia to re-focus the viewer's attention to consider the potentiality of what Jane Bennett calls ‘thing-power’,

Paul Nash, Flight of the Magnolia, 1944
Photo © Tate CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported)

In an essay from 1945, named after his ‘aerial flowers’ series, Nash describes how the Second World War affected his perception of the sky, he wrote -

"When the war came, suddenly the sky was upon us all like a huge hawk, hovering, threatening. Everyone was searching the sky, expecting the terror to fall. I among them scanned the low clouds … hunting the sky for what I most dreaded in my imagination. It was a white flower. Ever since the Spanish Civil War, the idea of the Rose of Death, the name the Spaniards gave to the parachute, had haunted my mind, so that when the war overtook us, I strained my eyes always to see that dreadful miracle of the sky blossoming with these floating flowers".

www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nash-flight-of-the-magnolia-t07552

Mysterious Clean Island

With J G Ballard's Drowned World on his mind, Hughes wandered around the Moseulpo port on Jeju's mainland after being evacuated from Gapado due to an impending typhoon. During his six months in South Korea, he embarked on a documentary series, and these selected images are a part of that project. The environment seemed to be bubbling and frothing, with the colour blue dominating the scenery. Rusty pipes, plastic wash tubs, and matted cleaning cloths littered the surroundings. Whirlpools of water illuminated at night, and there was a strange sense of vented worlds and smells wafting back and forth on the sea breeze. Everything seemed alive and squirming, both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

Hughes was fascinated by the strange pipes present in the port that drew seawater from the ocean to keep sea creatures, including fish and squid, alive. These creatures lived in confinement, awaiting their inevitable fate as food. At this fishing port there were no aesthetically pleasing nautical relics or tourist souvenirs for sale, only the squid staring back at him. Hughes was left to ponder what they were thinking.

'Mysterious Clean Island' will be published as a zine publication later this summer.

The themes of transcendence and illusion inform nearly all of Ballard's work, and have often been misconstrued by critics as representing a nihilistic or fatalistic preoccupation on the part of the author with devolution, decay, dissolution and entropy, these themes represent neither an expression of universal pessimism nor a negation of human values and goals, but, rather, an affirmation of the highest humanistic and metaphysical ideal: the repossession for humankind of authentic and absolute being.

Gregory Stephenson, Out of the Night and Into the Dream: A Thematic Study of the Fiction of J.G. Ballard [Westport: Greenwood Press, 1991] 2-3.

Video Vingnette 2

To imitate the calcareous tubes commonly found on shells, stones, and flotsam at the seashore. Hughes used moulded surf wax to attach tentacles onto this Turban shell that he collected from the rock pools on Gapado Island's coast. The turban shell or conch or Jeju's sora is also known as the Tangerine of the Sea. Collected in shallow sea areas around Jeju and Gapado Island along with abalone they are one of the primary sources of income for Haenyo 해녀 / sea women] female divers.

Text and video artworks by Andy Hughes © 2023
No unauthorised copying allowed without permission

Both video works are part of an ongoing series of video vignettes where still photographs are used and post-produced through various methods to bring life and presence to inanimate objects.

Video Vingnette 1

As Hughes stood on the rooftop of Gapado AiR, located next to the ocean, his attention was captivated by a mesmerizing scene unfolding before his eyes. The vast expanse of the ocean stretched out before him, its dark waters glistening under the moonlit night.

But what truly caught his gaze were the squid-fishing boats, scattered across the horizon, their presence announced by the luminous spectacle they created. The squid-fishing boats, adorned with an array of light bulbs, up to a staggering 700 in number, were meticulously mounted on tall poles, casting an ethereal glow that permeated the night sky. The vibrant lights served a specific purpose - to attract squid. The squid, drawn to the luminosity, gather around the boats, their luminescent dance becoming intertwined with the light glow emanating from above.

Hughes found himself contemplating the paradoxical beauty of this inverted illumination. In this seemingly simple act of squid fishing, he discovered a profound reminder of the intricate relationship between humans and the natural world.

Text and video artworks by Andy Hughes © 2023
No unauthorised copying allowed without permission