Tom Hunter - A Journey Back at The Arts Gallery

Tom Hunter - A Journey Back at The Arts Gallery

03 June, 2009
by: Tom Jeffreys

A woman lies in foot-long green grass. Her back is arched away from the viewer, her body awkward, identity hidden by a loose cascade of dark brown hair. In the distance a stripe of bland mid-rise housing cuts field from whitely cloudy sky. The image is Anchor & Hope, a new specially commissioned photograph by Tom Hunter, produced to celebrate the artist's first retrospective exhibition at The Arts Gallery.

The exhibition features selected works from five photographic series dating back to 1994, almost all of which focus on Hackney – its oft-overlooked inhabitants and its landscapes. It's entitled A Journey Back, so let us start with a look at this most recent work and then do as we are told and work backwards. If it is possible to use a single work as a synecdoche for an artist's entire oeuvre, then, conveniently, Anchor & Hope is a good place to begin. The work encapsulates many of Hunter's signature themes – urban decay, uncertain narrative, loneliness and alienation.


Tom Hunter, 'Anchor & Hope', Cibachrome print, 2009

And of course, the importance of art historical knowledge: whilst sometimes Hunter's appropriation of the likes of Vermeer or Millais can feel a little glib, here it is both neat and enlightening. The composition is borrowed from Andrew Wyeth's famous painting Christina's World in which a part-paralysed woman attempts to crawl through an ochre field to a house atop a hill. For Christina, the house is a destination, somewhere to want to arrive at, a shelter. In Hunter's urban version, the identikit housing is different. A blight? Perhaps, but Hunter is equivocal. And the pose of this unknown woman remains inscrutable.

Such a sense of ambiguity is important in Hunter's work. One of his most famous images is Woman Reading Possession Order from the Persons Unknown series. With lighting and composition borrowed from Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance, this is a lushly beautiful depiction of a horrible moment in an individual's life. This ability to find/create a theatrical beauty in scenes usually associated with a grim and po-faced realism is one of the most interesting aspects of the works on show. The homelessness, misery and squalor of Hunter's Hackney are communicated not with the grainy footage of the documentary film-maker but with the opulent textures of a renaissance painter.


Tom Hunter, 'Eve of the Party', Cibachrome print, 2000

Here then there is a central opposition that goes beyond an aesthetic choice to become a moral conundrum. What is Hunter doing? Is he highlighting social issues? Or pointing out that these are not problems to be solved, but people to be understood? Is he showing or creating? Condemning or celebrating? Probably all of these things, and that is why his work is so consistently fascinating.

One of the stand-outs in the exhibition is Eve of the Party from the Life and Death in Hackney series. A lone woman stands in what looks like a dilapidated warehouse. Through the broken skylights shines an angled column of bright sun. In a pool of rich creamy light on the dirty floor, the distorted shadow of the woman's head is akin to one of Holbein's anamorphic memento mori. Simply, this is a staggeringly gorgeous image.

Celebrating the beauty of the artfully arranged image has been out of fashion for a while, but Hunter, I hope, has brought it right back. A hope which, craftily, brings our little journey back to that first (last) work: Anchor & Hope.  For all their knowing theatricality, Hunter's photographs are rooted in the real. Real people and problems provide an emotional anchor that allows hope to float.  All art should probably aspire to this. Grounded, Hunter's work soars high above.

Tom Hunter - A Journey Back is at The Arts Gallery until 19th September 2009.
Hunter also has a new commission on display at Museum of London until March 2010.

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Tom Jeffreys