Gapado Artist in Residence Second

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.

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.