Art - Summer Show

Waiting for Donna Southern to come to the phone, I think about how to formulate what I want to say. ‘There’s something about your artwork that makes me feel repulsed’. It’s not something that I’ve ever said to an artist before and I’m a bit worried that it’ll be taken the wrong way. I say it anyway. “Good”, she says. That’s alright then. “It’s also beautiful though”, I add quickly. And it is. Donna is one of the Eastbourne group of contemporary artists that are exhibiting at the Thebes Gallery. She is a pacifist and a socialist which is what her work is all about. We talk about one of her explicitly anti-war pieces, ‘Political Bloodbath - Guts’. Gazing at it on my computer screen it looks like, well, the insides of someone’s intestines, I say. “It’s a sort of play on words about my reaction to the war”, she says, unfazed. “It’s partly about the way that we are being manipulated by the Government to go along with something we don’t feel comfortable with. We’re not allowed to protest”. And I suppose the physical horror of the war? I venture. “Absolutely. But a feminine beauty comes in to balance that - the sense of maternal sacrifice.” I ask her how she creates such an extraordinary effect. “The guts are made from bath cork squirted into shapes and then tinted with varnish and oils”, says Donna. “And the main body is cellophane, the black parts are apple crates and the blood vessels are lint coated in latex and rolled and tinted”. Anything else? “Oh and coloured glass.” Donna’s work will be displayed alongside other members of the Eastbourne group including this week's cover artist Meryl Stringell, Lindy Dunbar and Phyllis Hall. ER