‘Moloko Plus Six’ named after the infamous cocktail featured in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ where much of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece is set; representing six artists based in Thamesmead our rendition is a milk-based drink laced with six secret ingredients. Over the course of the summer we invite three local artist pairings to present their practice at the Lakeside Centre, as part of a Summer Residency to launch the recently reburnished community centre. Pull up a stool at the Thamesmead Texas bar and order a drink of the ‘Moloko Plus Six’ whilst overlooking the live demolition of the Clockwork Orange ‘Flat Block Marina’, more commonly known as Binsey Walk. Moloko Plus Six is a series of exhibitions, featuring pairs of artists based in Thamesmead.
Curated by Scully & Scully. Funded by Bow Arts Trust.
Thamesmead Texas brings together two artist’s working in sculpture, showing together for the first time. Natasha Bird and Miyuki Kasahara are united through the shared locality of Thamesmead and their sensibility for utilising the recycled and readymade to narrativize environmental and ecological concerns.
The river Thames flows less than a mile to the north of the Lakeside centre, essentially the bowels of greater London, just behind the centre is the Ridgeway a constructed walkway, designed by Joseph Bazalgette after a cholera outbreak in 1853 and the ‘Great Stink’ in 1858. This walkway encases the Southern Outfall sewer, leading directly to Crossness pumping station located in Erith Marshes. This engineering milestone at the base of the Thames informs perfectly the exhibition at Thamesmead Texas.
Bird’s modular sculpture ‘Embankment’ (2019) addresses directly the themes of consumption, waste and stagnation. These large modular curved panels are designed to be rearranged and take on different architectural forms, once bolted together they obstruct as well as channel the viewer to move according to the new form. The panels are constructed from wood and mulch, the mulch is produced from the discarded newspapers of London’s commuters and reformed to mirror and frame the concrete architecture that typifies the surrounding Thamesmead.
Miyuki Kasahara’s installation Utoh ‘Birds of Sorrow’ (2018) also takes waste product to address the ebb and flow of water, consumption, pollution and waste. Kasahara has collected a plethora of ephemera from the mud of the Thames, plastic toys, feathers, bottles, lids and all kinds of rusty unidentified fragments; and suspended each individually on crimson wire, dangling from ceiling to floor representing the flow of tears of the Utoh (bird of prey). Inspired by a 15th Century Japanese Noh play. This work was originally commissioned for ‘The Ghost Tide’ (2018) curated by Monika Bobinska and Sarah Sparkes. The narrative of the play tells the story of Utoh the hunter (Utoh is a seabird – the rhinoceros auklet) whose ghost is sent to hell to be tormented by his prey that have become phantom birds. Using detritus from the Thames foreshore, the work re-imagines this story for the 21st Century, raising the spectre of our environmental pollution and its deadly repercussions for marine life. For Thamesmead Texas Kasahara has incorporated a new rendition of the installation animating the flow of the Utoh’s tears of blood. “From the sky the parent bird is weeping tears of blood…faster and faster fall the tears of blood, until my body cannot escape their mortal touch.” (Zeami, Utoh – Birds of Sorrow).
NATASHA BIRD (1985) is an artist living and working in London. Her current work is concerned with ideas of flow and stagnation and their potential for production, both in historical and present-day real-world technologies, as well as sci-fi and fantastical narratives.
MIYUKI KASAHARA Born in Japan, and based in London, Kasahara graduated with an MA from the Royal College of Art and is based in London. Her research examines the factors affecting the global environment, including that arising from politics and societal change.