“Leave all the stress to the sea – in conversation with artist Denise Startin at Arcadia Gallery
 
My name is Xiaohan, and I am currently studying at Warwick University for an MA in International Cultural Policy and Management. As part of my course I am currently on a short work placement with Coventry Artspace who suggested I explore my interest in curation further by interviewing Denise Startin, a Coventry artist currently exhibiting at Artspace’s Arcadia Gallery in the city centre. It was the perfect task for a hot summer day.
 
I felt calm from the moment I stepped into the gallery. At first glance, all the works are about a person by the sea, sitting on rocks, leaning against a painted beach hut, reading a book or the newspaper, staring blankly. In the middle of the space is a pile of sand on which sits a red-and-white striped beach chair with a hat on top.
 
Denise studied at the Royal College of Art and has exhibited work at Compton Verney, Coventry Biennial and Whitechapel Gallery, London. The title of her exhibition is Hints for British Tourists, which was inspired by a pamphlet of the same name. In the original pamphlet, there is a particular sentence that intrigued her, ‘One of the reasons I like Britain and the British, apart from liking the Sunday Times, cheese cake, Constables in the Tate, ‘apples and pears’ and not to mention the liveliness of their pubs is because their idea of a holiday is not just lying around on the beach and drinking.’
 
With the pandemic, Brexit, and now air industry chaos, making it harder for people to travel, family holidays have become difficult. We agreed that everyone wants to go to the beach when they are stressed or unhappy, especially during the summer. Perhaps the heart is saying, ‘Don’t worry any more, leave the burden to the sea’. For Denise a summer seaside holiday was definitely something central to growing up and British culture. She described what she wants to bring to the audience in this exhibition, “I was interested in evoking memory, senses of place, evoking, you know, times away, or time with family, or time off, or time to just think when you’re on holiday. There’s a lot of dead moments, there’s lots of excitement building up to going on holiday, but sometimes when you’re on holiday, there’s a lot of boredom. So, I guess that’s what I was trying to bring, a sense of stillness to the idea of being on holiday.”

Situated in the centre of England, Coventry is considered far from the seaside. But I grew up in inland China, where the nearest coastline was more than 1,700km away! In my mind the sea is a place full of sunshine, sunsets, smiles and happiness, but I didn’t go there very often! It wasn’t until I came to England that I was struck by how different the sea could be, how cold and hot, how calm and crazy it could be. I have been reading Virginia Woolf’s books recently which describe a lot of seaside images. Denise’s evocative photographs of beach huts and grey skies have helped me visualise the British perspective of the seaside. What I feel most from the exhibition, and what strikes me as particular to the British experience of the seaside, is the calming power of stillness it has.

At the end of our conversation, I couldn’t help asking a question as a tourist, ‘Where do you recommend I travel to in Britain?’ She shares with me three of her favourite places: North Wales, Whitby, and the Jurassic Coast (where she took the images in her exhibition). As she talks about the coastal paths and the changing weather that she loves, I am beginning to realise how important the sea is to the psyche of this island nation.

Text and image reproduced from https://coventry-artspace.co.uk/blog/a-visit-to-the-seaside-by-xiaohan-wu/ (accessed 15/07/22)

I have received a bursary to attend a symposium and public forum exploring issues arising from UK City of Culture, looking forwards to what ‘legacy’ might mean for Coventry. Day 1 introduces ethnographic research, field research and participant observation methods and brings researchers that have been working with publics through participation and creative practices to share their work. For day 2, entitled Arts and the Urban Commons Forum, artists, curators and scholars share their work and ideas around the city and culture’s role in living together empathetically.  

Coventry’s year as UK City of Culture has now come to an end. This mega-cultural event brought with it an image-change agenda which seeks to remodel the city as a destination for cultural tourism, alongside claims of generating pride and well-being amongst Coventry’s citizens. In tandem with UK City of Culture 2021, significant city centre regeneration projects have been ‘green-lighted’ including the proposed City Centre South scheme.

We will hear from artists, curators, researchers and local citizens, offering insight into some of the cultural activities that are played out in the city as well as the broader context of arts and culture as a UK government process of regeneration. We imagine questions of agency, function and the depoliticization of arts and culture will result from the talks and conversations planned for the day.

Denise Startin: Hints for British Tourists

Text by Anneka French

A figure in a bowler hat, waistcoat and rolled-up trousers brushes sand from their feet. They read a book in front of a painted beach hut, climb on rocks, clutch a newspaper, wait, fall asleep and look out to sea. In one moment after another, we see tourism performed and time laid out in photographic frames like film stills.

Coventry-based artist Denise Startin presents a series of site-based performative actions, seen here via photographic documentation. The genesis of the exhibition Hints for British Tourists comprises two chance encounters: the discovery of a tourism pamphlet on eBay (also titled Hints for British Tourists) and a wall plaque on Hertford Street, Coventry, dedicated to the historic watchmaking trade that lists craftsmen Samuel Vale and George Howlette. The exhibition represents a re-staging and fictional expansion of these two very different starting points.

Vale & Howlette are adopted as dramatis personae in a wider body of work by the artist, becoming primary characters in a narrative that explores ideas of travel, leisure, time and memory performed by Startin herself and her partner. Startin’s work makes enquiries, both serious and humorous, that question what it means to be a tourist in post-Brexit England, in a world grappling with a pandemic and climate catastrophe, in a physical body that requires care and rest, and in a landlocked city more than one hundred miles from the nearest stretch of coastline.

The original pamphlet purchased by Startin was published in the former Yugoslavia in the 1970s, intended as a practical guide for travel. In it, the author observes, ‘One of the reasons I like Britain and the British, apart from liking the Sunday Times, cheese cake, Constables in the Tate, ‘apples and pears’ and not to mention the liveliness of their pubs is because their idea of a holiday is not just lying around on the beach and drinking.’ Startin’s work offers more than a nod to this ambiguous description, providing viewers with perspectives on place that appear both familiar and strange.

While also introducing historic travel mythologies relating to legendary, often unreachable places, the titles selected by Startin for the photographs shown – On the Rocks; Between a Rock and a Hard Place; Rush Hour – also point toward emotional states of being in motion, conflict, indecision or, indeed, indicate a sense of stillness. Vale & Howlette’s journey is as yet embryonic. They are on their way to who knows where.

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Denise Startin studied at the Royal College of Art and has exhibited work at Compton Verney, Coventry Biennial and Whitechapel Gallery, London. She is the recipient of multiple awards and bursaries and has completed artist residencies in Wrexham and the Lake District.