Kicking the Dog Will Do:

Painting Suburbia and its Creative Charge

Punk in the Suburbs

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Upper Hall, Union Chapel, Islington, London N1 2UN

Thursday 18 January 3 - 5.30pm

Convened by Geraint Evans and Dr Zoë Mendelson

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Speakers’ abstracts and biogs

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Prof. Matthew Worley

Suburban Relapse: Punk and the Politics of Boredom

 

This paper looks at British punk's relationship with boredom and suburbia, locating the suburbs as part of punk's 'negative drive' towards agency and activity. Taking its cue from Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch (1977) and The Members' 'The Sound of the Suburbs', it seeks to historically contextualise the suburban disaffection that ran through early British punk, arguing that such sensibility related to the socio-economic and demographic changes taking place from 1945.

 

Matthew Worley is professor of modern history at the University of Reading. He has published several articles on British punk for such journals as History Workshop, Twentieth Century British History and Contemporary British History. A book-length study, No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976-84, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. Worley is also a co-founder of the Subcultures Network:

http://www.reading.ac.uk/history/research/Subcultures/Sub-Pub.aspx

 

 

Fay Ballard

Alive in Suburbia

 

My drawing practice is autobiographical as a means of understanding my past and I start by describing my childhood life growing up in suburbia.

 

I was born in 1957 in Twickenham and we moved out to Shepperton in 1960. I was raised by my father after my mother died in 1964 when I was seven. I look at this upbringing, the lure of Shepperton, and my father’s ideas and concerns.

 

Far from closing down his imagination, suburbia fuelled it. My father felt a freedom. In Shepperton, he could be anonymous and write undisturbed. ‘Always follow your obsessions, drink at the well of your imagination’.

In the early 1970s, Shepperton was dissected in two by the building of the M3 motorway and I describe its impact.

 

More recently, Shepperton has become surrounded by high tech parks, gated sports clubs and housing communities, surveillance cameras, St George flags in back gardens – all part of the Ballardian dystopia of his later fiction.

 

I go on to explore my teenage life in Shepperton in the early 1970s and the tribalism of skinhead and hippy youth culture against a backdrop of a divisive education system before the explosion of punk and the introduction of Labour’s comprehensive school system.

 

The second half of my talk looks at my practice of drawing. Drawing my childhood memories, coming to terms with the loss of my parents and of my home, informed by psychoanalysis. It’s an inner journey and I discuss some of the critical thinking particularly around psychoanalysis which has influenced me.

 

Fay Ballard’s practice is drawing, informed by psychoanalysis. Since her father’s death in 2009, she has focused on an autobiographical exploration of her childhood as a means of understanding her past. Fay’s exhibition House Clearance (Eleven Spitalfields, London, 2014 and & Model, Leeds 2015) investigated evocative objects – personal belongings which evoke memories or thoughts - and explored the notion of home as an emotional space. Her recent drawings will be shown in Breathe at the Freud Museum, London, in May 2018, curated by Caroline Garland, a psychoanalyst.

 

Fay is visiting artist at Hammersmith hospital, making art with patients at their bedsides, as part of Imperial Health Charity’s (NHS) audience development programme.

She studied history of art at Sussex University in the late 1970s and worked at the RA and Tate before completing MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in 2006. She exhibits regularly, most recently at Pi Artworks London in Family Reunion (autumn 2017) which explored the notion of family, and at Charing Cross hospital for eight months as part of Imperial Health’s Art in Focus series (2017). She has talked to MA students at the RCA and Camberwell as well as participated in conferences at the Freud Museum, the British Library, Leeds and Anglia Ruskin Universities.

 

A child of the suburbs, Fay was born in Twickenham in 1957 and brought up in 1960s and 70s Shepperton by her father, the novelist, J G Ballard. She now lives in north London.

www.fayballard.com

 

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