Meet the Gale Warning Artists

Finn-Kelcey (1968-2014) lived and worked in London, and first came to prominence in the early 1970s as an artist central to the emerging communities of performance and feminist art in the UK. The nature of Finn-Kelcey’s work is diverse, both in form and subject matter. Her work considers topics as varied as life, death and spirituality.

The title of the exhibition refers to a flag artwork by Finn-Kelcey, made in 1971 to be displayed on Alexandra Palace, London. Finn-Kelcey called the artwork a ‘wind-dependent object’, meaning that it required a weather event, out of the artist’s control, to operate.

Another work in the exhibition has the message ‘Power for the People’ installed on a flag on Battersea Power Station in London in 1972. Echoing the activist call ‘Power to the People’, Finn-Kelcey’s work also refers to the decommissioning of the power station in the early 1970s, when publicly owned services were being privatised.

Anne Tallentire (b. 1949, Northern Ireland) lives and works in London. Her practice encompasses moving image, sculpture, installation, performance, and photography. Tallentire’s artwork seeks to explore the built environment and its systems and structures. Her recent work has explored the process of being separated from one’s homeland and how physical barriers have been constructed. From 1993, Tallentire has also made work as part of the artist duo work-seth/tallentire with John Seth.

In the exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, Look Over 4 is a newly commissioned floor drawing from a series of similar works in which Tallentire traces the floorplan of an apartment at life size. The floorplan at Kettle’s Yard is of one of the apartments in the Manor Place block nearby on King’s Street, Cambridge. The complex was designed as part of a social housing project by Cambridge City Council, University academics and Jesus College, Cambridge. The project, completed in 1977, was characteristic of a more hopeful moment in development, when good and affordable housing for all was very important.

Tarek Lakhrissi (b. 1992, Châtellerault) is a French artist. Lakhrissi’s work combines time-based media and installation with elements drawn from poetry, pop culture, and literature. His work centres on queer and diasporic perspectives and experiences. Language, text, and poetry are the foundations of his working process, guiding each project as he transforms written ideas into visual media. His work delves into the performative power of language, and with a poetic, erotic, and nostalgic impulse, his work imagines alternative queer futures. Through this multidisciplinary approach, Lakhrissi navigates complex emotions and identities, crafting spaces where queerness, resistance, and desire come together to challenge conventional narratives and imagine new possibilities.

At Kettle’s Yard, Lakhrissi’s installation Unfinished Sentence I has ten hanging elements suspended in a lavender-filtered light, a colour often used to signify queer and LGBTQIA+ community. Ndayé Kouagou’s sound collage, including samples from the theme music of Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer plays at intervals. This work draws inspiration from French writer Monique Wittig’s 1969 book Les Guérillères  (The Guerillas), a landmark work of lesbian feminist literature, in which an Amazon-like warrior tribe revolt against modern sexism.

Pia Arke (1958-2007) was a Greenlandic and Danish artist, writer and photographer. Arke enrolled at the Department of Theory and Communications at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. In 1995 she graduated with an MFA with the published thesis ‘Ethno-Aesthetics’, critiquing the stereotyping of ‘Eskimo’ art as primitive. Today her work continues to push the boundaries of artistic expression, challenging conventional ideas of identity and representation, with a particular emphasis on elevating the voices and experiences of women. Arke’s work offers a profound sense of purpose and her work is only recently being widely recognised.

Arctic Hysteria is one of a series of works by Pia Arke with this title, which are on display at Kettle’s Yard. It refers to a medical condition diagnosed by colonial officials among Indigenous Inuit communities in the early twentieth century. Used to characterise Inuit women as vulnerable, this condition was used to justify their mistreatment. In this work, Arke counters the exploitative images of women diagnosed with arctic hysteria, appearing cool and unmoved, as she enters the frame nude, investigates, and tears up a photograph of the Arctic Fjord at Narsaq in Greenland, an area she lived in as a child. She seems to seek a connection to the landscape. In the exhibition, we can also see a torn print Nuugaarsk Point in Narsaq, which has been reassembled. In both works Arke disrupts a romantic image of the Arctic landscape, fragmenting it as if to show the wounds imposed on Greenland under Danish colonialism (which lasted until 1953) and in the following, continued disempowerment of the Inuit people.

Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Chile) is a poet, artist, activist and filmmaker whose work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including environmental destruction and human rights. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s, after the military coup against the president Salvador Allende. In London, she was a co-founder of Artists for Democracy in l974.

She coined the term “Arte Precario” in the mid-1960s in Chile, as a new independent and non-colonized category for her precarious works composed of debris, structures that disappear in the landscape. In Here is a Gale Warning, Vicuña features many photographs of these precarios in the street, pulling our attention to a city’s rhythms and harsh environment, where the precarios may be ignored or destroyed by preoccupied city dwellers. Vicuña has said they are ‘prayers’ in which what has been destroyed and fragmented may be woven together again. They are like custodians for a different, more connected way of being in even the most hostile environment.

Justin Caguiat (b. 1989, Tokyo) lives and works between New York and California. Caguiat’s spiritual, dreamlike paintings depict abstract worlds, as figures and other lifeforms appear and fade into a mix of patterned colours. Though clearly modern, Caguiat’s paintings draw on a mix of artistic traditions.

At the centre of Caguiat’s large scale painting Pissing in the Stars is a cluster of marks that look like a constellation. The stars have traditionally been used to situate us in time and space, but in this painting, they are disorienting. Instead of place or landscape, Caguiat’s paintings condense images and forms like a lucid dream. In Pissing in the Stars there is a giraffe and a daisy chain, something gate-like and flag-like and heart-shaped in the lower left corner alone. There are references to other artists and works in the blousy plumes of colour and art-deco motifs, but also to psychedelic counterculture, Japanese Ukiyo-e prints and early Manga. His paintings stretch to the limits of their raw canvas edges as if they are uncontainable. The rich worlds in Caguiat’s paintings help us to picture the rich vitality of the world and offer ways to survive within the noise.