Julian Perry

Julian Perry is acclaimed for his narrative driven landscape paintings of the collision between a quintessentially idyllic natural environment and the scraps and scars of the modern, man-made world. His most recent collection of work, A Common Treasury, consists of witty, occasionally haunting paintings of sheds from the now destroyed Manor Allotments in Leyton, London.

Whilst alluding to to the lives and personalities of their owners, they are also monuments to the allotment movement and are charged with a poignancy, as Perry explains, “that this precious enclave of cultivation and wildlife is being wiped off the face of the earth at exactly the time when the predicted climate change has become a reality”.

On Wednesday 6 July 2005 the President of the International Olympic Committee announced that announced that London had won its bid to stage the 2012 Olympic Games. The nation duly rejoiced as Tony Blair hailed this ‘momentous day’. Yet for some, especially those who live and work in and around the proposed site of the 2012 Olympics in East London – including Julian Perry – the news elicited a more considered and poignant response. Perry’s studio, situated in a defunct peanut-processing plant, is a mere javelin’s throw away from the proposed Olympic stadium. Although it is safe from the bulldozers,being just outside the Olympic perimeter, Perry’s neighbourhood is about to undergo a seismic change. ‘I wanted in some way to respond the his earth-shaking event through my work,’ says Perry, ‘which I though of as a kind of beneficent disaster’. There would, of course, be opportunities for re-growth and regeneration, but at the same time some precious and unique features of the landscape were to yield inevitably to the relentless onslaught of the bulldozer, consigned for ever to a landscape of memory…

… Perhaps the most striking aspect of Perry’s paintings of the Manor Garden allotments is the absence of landscape, curious perhaps given the artist’s past projects, such as the Epping Fprest paintings of 2004, in which the natural environment is a central theme. But, as Perry states, he did not wish in this instance to make a pictorial record of the Manor Garden, but rather capture the essence of something that was t o him emblematic of its historic and aesthetic significance. Above all else, Perry became fascinated by the range and variety of garden sheds, ramshackle man-made structures transmuted for generations of plot-holders, and which epitomise the idiosyncratic make-and-mend philosophy of allotment culture. Although there are no people in Perry’s paintings, the sheds collectively stand for the evolution and survival of a community against the odds…

… As I write this piece, the bulldozers are moving in on the Manor Gardens and the few remaining allotment holders are picking the last of their runner beans, packing their tools, and dismantling – and, in some cases, even burning – their sheds.

Extract from Meditations on the Manor Garden Allotments by Martin Postle, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale University

_{Image: No Door Shed, 2007 (detail, top) and Greenhouse Shed, 2006 (right) © Julian Perry}