Launch event: Saturday 10 May 2025, 6-8pm
at Islomania, Post Office Gallery, 22-23 Cecil Square, Margate, CT9 1BA

Early copies available at The End: Artists' Book Fair, The Exchange Gallery, Penzance, 9 & 10 May 2025

******************************************************************************************************

      
Issue Contributors: Ilona Szalay, Paul Murphy, Kavel Rafferty, Alli Sharma, Janet Sainsbury, Jennifer Caroline Campbell, Steve Lomax, David Bradshaw, Rocky Alvarez, Cathy Lomax, Vincent Hawkins, Anne Ryan, Joe Teilo Taylor, Rose Bradshaw, Lisa Temple Cox, Alex Michon

Island Life

In 2009 I wrote a piece called 'Islomania' for our sister publication, Garageland, something I returned to when I started to think about this Islands issue of Arty. It also provided the name for an exhibition (where this issue is being launched) by six contemporary artists, including myself and my collaborator on this project, Kavel Rafferty. The contributing artists have all completed an island themed questionnaire and you can read their thoughts in the Islomania feature. The exhibition is taking place in Kavel's gallery in the former Post Office in Margate, a fitting location as Margate is on the Isle of Thanet. Thanet may no longer be an island, but as David Bradshaw and Rocky Alvarez find the river Wantsum, which was at one time a two mile wide shipping channel, still divides Thanet from the mainland.

I live in the often grey and wet British Isles which may be why the dream of sunny islands has such an allure for me and many of the Arty contributors. The Caribbean in particular is well represented – Alli Sharma sends us a postcard from her current base in the Cayman Islands, Janet Sainsbury paints portraits of writer Jean Rhys who grew up in Dominica, and Alex Michon, in her article about contemporary art and islands, considers works about Barbados, St Lucia and Grenada by Sonia Boyce, Isaac Julien and Steve McQueen respectively.

But there is also an altogether more dystopian view of islands, in which their relative isolation and geography provides a space to exercise despotic behaviour. This is represented in the issue by Steve Lomax and Paul Murphy's investigation, in words and pictures, into Francisco Scaramanga and Emman Kananga, the villainous bad guys in the Bond films The Man With the Golden Gun (1974) and Live and Let Die (1973), and the fictional islands they inhabit.

The isolation of an island allows a writer to develop a world – such as Jennifer Caroline Campbell's Comb Island which informs her work in the Islomania exhibition. Her notes about this strange fictional Island, which has a pond shaped like a warped diamond, and is peopled by a green skinned Princess in a beige pencil skirt and Tina the brave-hearted clompy pony with sunset pink fur, are included in the issue. The island is also a frequent device in children’s fiction. Enid Blyton's The Island of Adventure (1944) and Wild Cat Island in Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons (1930) allow children to create their own world undisturbed by adults - something which of course goes awry in Lord of the Flies.

So an island can be a fortress, literally and figuratively, or it can be a place on which we project fantasies or goals (such as in Powell and Pressburger's 1945 film I Know Where I’m Going). Or it can be somewhere to bury your head in the sand and get away from reality. This is the case in Boom! a very odd 1968 film developed by Tennessee Williams' from his play The Milk Train Doesn't Stop here Anymore, which I write about later in the issue. The film, which was made on a secluded Sardinian island, utilises the star power of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in their glorious pomp to infuse the strange allegorical characters they play.

The British Isles of course loom large in the issue and thoughts on, and images of, some of the smaller isles are peppered throughout the issue. Notably of these is Tresco, one of the Isles of Scilly, and the favourite island of Joe Teilo Taylor. In 'An Island State of Mind' (accompanied by Rose Bradshaw's delicate drawings of shells), Joe writes: 'Islands are places where cause and effect is obvious, where the fine balance between brutality and fragility is never closer. They are simultaneously microcosmic and macrocosmic'.

Cathy Lomax
May 2025    

******************************************************************************************************

Arty 49

£5 + UK postage (contact us for international orders)

******************************************************************************************************