Man of Kent

Solo show at Piccalilli, London

On Monday 25th March I opened my new exhibition ‘Man of Kent’ at Piccalilli Gallery, underneath 161 Food & Drink in Sydenham, south London SE25 4QJ

It is open Thurs & Fri 5-8pm and Sat 12-8pm or by appointment and has been extended until 27th April.

It's my most personal presentation to date. Usually I make eco-tinged work about worms or hide behind food activities with several collaborators, but for this show, set in a basement under a neighbourhood restaurant less than a mile from where I used to live, I wanted to test my resolve to be more vulnerable. Ostensibly this is a show about fermentation, how could it not be? But it also about transmuting feelings through fermentation. I am thrilled that Dr Kaajal Modi was able to contribute a text that pins this so precisely.

Here, I'm including all texts related to the show and some photos by Corey Bartle-Sanderson. Thanks to Steven Gee for the invitation and support. Hope you enjoy!

Description

The artist presents an installation of his first ever ink drawings, depicting found images and half-remembered tableaux of pubs he lived in and frequented as a child of a publican in the Kentish town of Tonbridge.

On the correx walls, three large drawings -in beetroot, coffee and walnut- are pinned in with foraged blackthorn. The homemade plant inks and makeshift felt-tips carved from birch polypore used to make them sit atop a low platform with items ranging from darts to jars of dried onion skins and pewter mugs that have been partially melted into casts of bottlecaps, lighters and car keys. The twelve small drawings in oak gall and leftover cyanotype inks, weighted down by the curios, are impressions of archival photographs found while scouring the Tonbridge section of www.dover-kent.com.

A collection of tongue-and-groove panels salvaged from an old school that make the platform are propped up by one hundred brown glass beer bottles, with stacked vintage beermats compensating for the uneven concrete floor. The contents of the bottles, fifty litres of expired brown ale donated by a gallery in Nottingham, have been emptied into demijohns and brewing vessels sat in a recess. Each is equipped with a vinegar mother and an aquatic bubbler pumping constant oxygen in. Over the course of the exhibition, the beer will go through aerobic fermentation and develop a productive environment for acetobacteria to create a unique malt vinegar. This non-human collaboration renders a product unusable and illicit by consumer standards into a living probiotic seasoning for the home cook.

The old pub cellar that Piccalilli now occupies is a fitting and familiar site of fermentation for both material lifecycle performances and emotional hardship derived from complex family dynamics. Parental divorce, bigoted socialisation and normalised alcoholism provided a backdrop for a strange and inconsistent upbringing that created psychological blockages that this installation is trying to help metabolise.

Materials

Donated paperstock, homemade plant inks (oak gall, walnut, daffodil, beetroot, coffee), cyanotype ink, darts, blackthorn, pewter, birch polypore, tongue and groove panelling, vintage beer mats, expired dark ale, vinegar mother, loaned home brew equipment, aquatic bubblers, plum tree sections, custom brushes, kilner jars, wicker basket

Thanks

Pauline Puttock, Renata Minoldo, Vlada Prendelina, Justin at Pagemasters, Sonia Odedra, Ryan Boultbee at Surface Gallery, The Field, Dr Kaajal Modi, Josh and Ben at 161 Food & Drink, Steven Gee

Man of Kent Vinegar is an artist edition of 100, available for purchase for a donation of at least £20 to Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) who support urgent relief work with Palestinian farmers. Please message me seanroyparker@gmail.com for details.

Drawings are also available for sale, please contact Steven piccalilli.gallery@gmail.com

Man of Kent Vinegar sticker design

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Pub life

in this pub I first tasted alcohol

a child dipping his finger in lager and lime

in this pub I threw darts with my brother and practised subtraction 

while dad ignored me, smoking

in this pub I learnt to like pickled eggs

in this pub I discovered the universal sign for wanker

in this pub I met the landlady who would become my stepmum

in that pub I begged my real mum to pick me up

in this pub I beat everyone at pool

almost got punched by a pensioner

in that pub I lived for three years

became a teenager, watched wrestling upstairs, then Eurotrash then Babestation

in this pub I was served strong lager while in school uniform

in the same pub i threw up in the urinal

in this pub I tried too hard to impress the lads

joining in with their casual sexism, drinking until I couldn't see straight

later, in this pub, I sold my labour too cheaply

worked fifteen hour days and spent my wages at lock-ins

In this pub I recognised I was part of social cleansing

In this pub I lost my taste for self-pity

In that pub I gave up state-funded contempt for my health

Text contributed by Dr Kaajal Modi:

Everything becomes vinegar in the end, it’s the final state of the universe

You can add sugar, salt, flour, water, soil, compost, bacteria, but let’s face it, it’s no use

In the end, it’s vinegar all the way down

In the end, all we inherit is vinegar

What does heritage mean to you? Something inherited, an heirloom, some jewellery, money, your genes, your habits,

a curled tongue, a raised eyebrow, a soapy taste

A story about who you are and where you come from, what you eat and what you enjoy, how you live and where your

partners’ mother was born, and where they went when they died

Her story frames the story of you, the human, the holobiont, the environmental being, an organism whose tendrils

shape the world around you and who is shaped in turn by the container that holds you (your body, multiple)

You smell the world, and taste it, and breathe it, and become part of it

But if it does sour, could you use it to dress a salad, clean a window or a floor, as food, as medicine?

Universal vinegar as a balm for the soul, as food for the gut, as a metaphor for becoming

If in the end everything becomes vinegar, then in the end so do you

*

The culture of pubs and emotional indigestion

Could our inability to process trauma and loss be considered a form of emotional indigestion? Traumatic experiences and strong emotions are known to have lasting impacts on the gut. This has long been evident in our felt experience and the language we use (e.g. gut feeling, sick to your stomach, the idea that someone “has guts”), yet it is only relatively recently that our subjective experiences have begun to be backed up by science. At UCLA in 2017, it was demonstrated how emotional experiences can have a lasting impact on the gut microbiome (Labus et al, 2017), and work on the microbiota-gut-brain axis has further shown the biological and physiological basis of ‘psychiatric, neurodevelopmental, age-related, and neurodegenerative disorders’ (Cryan et al, 2019). Migration has also recently been shown to change our capacity to process foods and feelings, in many cases resulting in wholesale changes of the gut microbiomes of entire community, alongside an apparently concordant susceptibility to metabolic diseases (Vangay et al, 2018; Shad et al, 2023).

I tend to be wary of explanations that pathologise difference, as though the act of being human in all its differential modes is something to be diagnosed and cured. The research studies of migrant microbiomes are most often conducted along the boundaries of the nation-state. This makes it easy for well-meaning wellness seekers and bad faith actors alike to conflate the findings with essentialising narratives about who we are, where we come from, how we ought live and what we should eat.

How far, I wonder, does one have to migrate to metabolise this process? Our gut microbiome is always changing, even as we move from the country to a city, from one building to another, one room to the next. This is a process so ubiquitous that there is no recognisably essential notion of what ‘good’ gut health looks like. Tim Spector and his Zoe app would have us believe that this is an environment that can be quantified, measured and controlled. And perhaps it can. However, I am proud of my unruly microbes, the vinegar that lives in my gut and its unwillingness to be conquered, subdued, colonised.

The feminist in me (perhaps the multiple microbial one) recognises this tendency towards unruliness in Roy’s work. He will not hesitate to fill a gallery with a bean farm and then demand that the audience contend with the materiality of processing, eating and dealing with everything that gets left behind. He will tend carefully to the beings – human and otherwise – he brings into these spaces, using practices such as fermentation, scavenging, gleaning and foraging in the landscape as a means to recruit you into his tireless crusade towards food sovereignty, and away from supermarkets. Yet he is unwilling to fully opt out of the system if he cannot bring everyone with him, which is something I greatly respect. His work makes me think about what non-toxic masculinity might look like, one that lives within and learns from what I think of as a space of feminist ecological thinking and practice.

Man of Kent is both the exhibition's name, and a pub that Roy used to visit with his dad. He has hacked a setup to turn 120 bottles of expired ale into vinegar for the duration of the show, and is drawing old pubs. He’s worried about the drawings, but all I see when he shows me the drawings is how much he cares. We need ecological masculinities that allow us to leave behind essentialised and outdated notions of manhood, as a way to move towards generative and nuanced discourses of masculinity in relation to social and environmental justice (Hultman and Pulé, 2018). These are ideas that build on ecofeminist and feminist environmental humanities notions of entanglement, care and responsibility.

I had the pleasure recently of visiting Jacqueline Donachie’s Advice Bar NU, a Genius-style bar where you can trade a problem for a drink, and as you drink it, the bartender advises you on what you might do about your problem. Sitting alongside a fermentation workshop, and felting, crafting and knitting projects, my gin and tonic with a side of advice was suddenly a feminist intervention. It made me realise how important it is to the feminist project to include spaces where men can talk about and process their messy, intractable emotions.

Roy has built a space for ecological, biological, emotional processing, inspired by and taking place in the bowels of an old pub. The Pub occupies a curious place within British cultural practice and memory. It is both the site of, and a site of resistance to, culturally dominant discourses of masculinity. Siting an installation here invites you into a practice of inheriting, digesting, processing and dealing with the smelly mess that living in the world unavoidably, metabolically forces you to contend with. I suggest you breathe it in, and allow yourself to become part of it.

References

Labus, J.S., Hollister, E.B., Jacobs, J. et al. Differences in gut microbial composition correlate with regional brain volumes in irritable bowel syndrome. Microbiome 5, 49 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40168-017-0260-z

Cryan, J., Dinan, T. Mind-altering microorganisms: the impact of the gut microbiota on brain and behaviour. Nat Rev Neurosci 13, 701–712 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3346

Vangay P., Johnson A.J., Ward T.L. et al. US Immigration Westernizes the Human Gut Microbiome. Cell 4. (2018). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.10.029

Shad, N., Cunningham, S., & Shaikh, N. Migration Spurs Changes in the Human Microbiome: A Review. Current Developments in Nutrition 6(Suppl 1) (2022). https://doi.org/10.1093/cdn/nzac069.032