The world's attention seems to be squarely focused on East London this week, so I thought it appropriate to catalogue some of what I find inspirational about that oft depicted part of the city.
Last summer, some friends and I stumbled out of a rooftop party in East London, which had been put on by a super trendy PR firm. It had been a thoroughly contemporary Shoreditch experience: lots of lithe men with rolled up pant cuffs and striped tops, lots of boyish young women with angular haircuts and tiny trapeze dresses. The DJ had hit the perfect level of irony, and the vodka drinks were warm but strong. As we hit the street, we were drawn to an exhibition in the ground level windows of the building. I now sometimes struggle to remember a time before the works of artist Dan Hillier were part of my world.
In his surreal, at once fanciful and disturbing, Victorian-inspired etchings, Dan Hillier seems to capture a precarious, perilous state of womanhood. Victorian society simultaneously idolized and brutalized women, placing women into a gilded cage that forced them to live up to unrealistic expectations of angelic womanhood, on pain of falling from those dizzying heights into the hellish plight of the "fallen woman". That woman had the capacity to be angel or beast, but never human, seems clear in Hillier's work, and the women in his pieces seem to dance on that precipice without fear of their doom.
For me, Hillier's work and the places it took me were a rich seam of inspiration, more to come on that in the next post...
