The Importance Of Elsewhere

I love it when you stumble upon something completely unexpected that fires up your imagination. This happened to me last Friday. I was driving down the Maidstone Road into Chatham, intent on going to the Look At Medway photography exhibition at the Brook Theatre Gallery, when my attention was caught by a sign outside a large Victorian House: “Art Show”.
Worth a look, I thought. If it’s twee, I’ve wasted five minutes and if it’s good I’ll be glad I stopped off. I made my way back up the street to an attractive-looking detached house that seemed a rather incongruous setting for an exhibition. Another sign outside, which I’d missed on my way down the road, said “The Importance Of Elsewhere”.
This sounded familiar, but at the time I couldn’t quite place it. I wandered in and was immediately greeted by a couple of the organisers, who explained that the building was Chatham’s former Registry Office, warned me that things were a little crowded at present and offered me a cup of coffee. You don’t get that at the Tate Modern. I was intrigued.

In its former incarnation, the Registry Office was the overseer and underscorer of births, marriages and deaths for the town: the gateway for most of life’s major rites of passage. The exhibition wasn’t just borrowing an abandoned building; inspired by Philip Larkin’s poetry, most of the pieces comprising the show were created in direct response to it.
In fact, given the office’s transitory status (it’s going to be refurbished as a residential unit in a few months’ time) countless opportunities were taken to merge the art with the building itself. For example, the lines of poetry written on the municipal-building-style carpet guards running up the stairway and the use of fireplaces as pedestals and focal points.
Elsewhere, the building’s wallpaper was used as a canvas for numerous pieces. Lines from Larkin’s work were scratched into beautiful wooden handrails and graffitied onto bannisters. Fire exit signs were incorporated into larger works and multicoloured twines of fabric spilled out of ventilation grills and ran alongside bright-red fire alarm wiring.

Larkin’s infamous This Be The Verse (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad…”) was embroidered onto a curtain that hung in front of a marker-pen modified window. It seemed like a fitting comment on the phenomenon of suburban window-twitchers and the minor domestic atrocities conducted in the name of familiar and societal respectability.
The place was a perfect physical synthesis. As the exhibition’s accompanying leaflet comments, “Participants have picked up on Larkin’s recurring themes – the relentless force of time, the route of ordinary man through life’s fleeting collisions with happiness, and the journey towards the resting place of Elsewhere.”
In several cases, it was hard to tell how much conscious thought had gone into the creation of the work and how much the building had permeated the subconscious regions of those involved. Was the wallpaper samples book used as the basis for written texts simply a cheap and convenient found material, or a hint at the multiple layers of time embodied by the building?

Dust-marks left behind by clocks that had hung on the wall were seized upon by the participants and used to profound effect to comment upon “time’s eroding agents”. Window casements were used as anchors for brightly coloured swathes of material. A safe – presumably too heavy to shift and left behind after the move – housed two pairs of gold shoes.
I liked the unintentional irony of the straightforward administrative sign on the inside of the front door (“Please make sure you have SET THE ALARM if you are the last one to leave!!!”). Also of presumably unplanned poignancy was the network socket at floor level in the A Love Seat Removed room, discreetly marked with the label “END OF LINE”.
I chatted for some time to creative director Tania Holland, as well as Wendy Daws, one of the artists involved in leading the project. They explained the involvement of various community groups in the project, including Kent Association for the Blind and MCCH Pathways (which works with adults with learning disabilities, autism or mental health problems).

The Importance Of Elsewhere worked on so many different levels: as a philosophical repositioning in terms of identity and creativity of what would seem at face value to be a rather stuffy administrative building; as an exploration of Larkin’s most essential themes; as a demonstration that an inclusive form of community art can be vibrant and compelling.
What I enjoyed most about this show was its sense of playfulness. Though dealing with weighty and occasionally potentially uncomfortable themes, there was an overall sense of joie de vivre in the engagement with the building and the determination to make the most of the fascinating and fantastic opportunity that its circumstances provided.
Ironically, the event’s success subverts its own title, indicating that The Importance Of Elsewhere is actually located very clearly in the here and now. It’s a credit to the hard work, imagination and self-confidence (newly acquired, in some cases) of all those involved and a fascinating model for future projects, both in Medway and… elsewhere.
Further reading and viewing

• Curious Planet case study
• Flickr: my photo set
• Flickr: Phil Dillon’s photo set