"Ode to Haringey" Portraits Exhibition
Amongst the whirlwind of a nine weeks stint, between the show’s proposal and launch, it’s hard to say how this exhibition of portraits began at the Green Rooms. I moved to Haringey with my husband in 2009 because we fell in love with our house and the area. My husband’s first home was in Wood Green until he was 8 months old and I had studied my BA at Middlesex University when it’s Fine Art Mixed Media campus was based in Wood Green (formerly Hornsey School of Art), so it felt as if somehow we were both being pulled back, full circle to a chapter in our lives both familiar and new. Now, I am a Mother of two, to a four and a half year old son, and a twenty-month baby boy. Previously I worked in free-lance animation and branding. So, living here, observing the community that surrounds us, my emotions have been stirred by the warmth of the community, so much so that I’ve been feeling an exhibition/collection brewing for quite some time. I love this area with all the diversity and fusion of people, ideas and backgrounds. Hence, my choice of people to draw has come with ease, from meditating upon those I regularly encounter.
There’s the jovial chap Zafar, who runs Turnpike Lane Tube News Agents, with all his telling collection of gluten free snacks and choice of coconut waters. The beautiful and humble Sevin, who happily serves the best of mochas in “The Cabin”, her cozy coffee shop on Wightman Road, and whom always smiles and has a moment to give to my children to learn of their day. Siad my local “Spotless Dry Cleaners” never fails to wave at my kids on the way to Fairfax Park, whilst he busily sews garments on his industrial sewing machine positioned in the window. There’s Violette, behind the slick lobby bar at the Green Rooms, whom I owe the first kindling of this exhibition to. These are all folks in my neighborhood, Haringey, engaging people with a civility that makes every day existence in London feel more like that of being in a small village. Friends who moved out of London to start their families may regard our choice of remaining here to raise our kids, as a very urban one, but the reality is, it feels very intimate. We know all the shopkeepers, our milkman, postman, neighbors, we are proud and uplifted by their diversity and friendliness.
These inhabitants are the ones whom gave me a chair in the height of summer when days away from giving birth to my sons, and whom now they in turn call “Auntie” and “Uncle”, shake hands and high-five. I survived my University years as a nanny, and it seemed symbolic that one of the children I cared for came to see me at the launch of this show. We had not seen each other since 1996, when he was just 5 years old. I loved that job, and seeing him reminded me of how children and their perception has always intrigued me, since it is precisely that which is going to shape the future of our planet. Always, it has been paramount for my husband and I to find an area we could raise our children with ease, we often spoke of finding a place to nest and call home, with the knowledge that it would be both an integrated and culturally diverse community. My eldest son is already showing signs of feeling how special this area is. Often he will ask to sit in the Cypriot Orthodox Church on Wightman Road on the way back from Fairfax Park. At the wise old age of three, while sitting on a pew observing the ornate murals of it’s interior, he proclaimed in a whisper “It’s full of all kinds of magic”.
Being big foodies, my husband and I were drawn to Haringey for it’s sheer ease of finding ingredients for any recipe a book or Sunday supplement might fall open upon. All our favorite shops are within a stone’s throw – “Wood Green Shopping Mall” for Caribbean, Mauritian, Chinese and South East Asian cuisine, “Buy2Save” for fruit and veg and “Fish Bazaar” for the juiciest of fresh water prawns – both on Turnpike Lane, “Yasir Halim” – a food mecca for the community with a bakery to die for, “Baldwin’s Butchers” situated on the Green Lanes - who have been there for 45 years and are able to offer everything, from cuts of Ossobocco to whole fresh rabbits, and so I really feel it’s the food that makes this area what it is, it is written in the physique of the people that live here, their pride of heritage in their ability to have such things close to hand.
As a mother of mixed raced children and indeed a Eurasian myself, I feel the need and cravings of our heritage and too am strengthened by the ability to return to certain traditions via the enjoyment of eating, and sharing certain meals, it is a means that unites us all. The very same dishes my late Chinese mother lovingly prepared for me as a child are reoccurring themes for me in my work and daily life. She passed away when I was four, I cannot remember her voice, her face, indeed I have no visual memories I can recollect, but my taste buds and nose remembers flavors and aromas intensely, and that is wonderfully comforting.
Therefore, these etched portraits, all originally sketched from life, signify so much more than just observations of form. They are my longings to capture a kind of visual poem of a people co-existing, and with in each individual’s poem there is a story, not only their story, but their ancestor’s stories, both near and from far off lands, with all their love, pain, mystery and wonder, and I can only be grateful to be part of such a culturally rich and inspirational community that is an “Ode to Haringey”.
“Ode to Haringey” Exhibition runs until 28th January 2017 at the U.K.’s first arts hotel, Green Rooms, 13 – 27 Station Road, Wood Green, London N22 6UW. Open 07:30 – 23:00 everyday (greenrooms.london).
All work is for sale, for each portrait, I have printed an edition of 20, and as an extension of my gratitude, 15% of all sales are going to the Haringey based charity ‘Action For Kids’ (www.actionforkids.org).
