Review: Turner staff ‘Frntofhouse’ gallery exhibition

By Dan Thompson

Twenty artists who are usually overlooked in Margate’s biggest gallery take centre stage in the annual (ish) Frntofhouse exhibition.

The artists all have roles at Turner when they’re not making their own work – either front-of-house, or in the shop. But for this exhibition, they come together as a collective, organising, curating, and marketing their own show. It is – as you’d expect – an eclectic show.

There are familiar faces like Steven Alan, a graduate in Photography from Canterbury Christ Church University in 2012, who has exhibited widely since, producing zines, and being part of Crate’s programming team. His work uses real film, and an assortment of old cameras, to capture a Margate which is unquestionably now, in all its glorious scruffiness, but where the photos already feel faded and worn, like the pictures from 20 years ago you find in a box in a junk shop.

And while Steven has been active since leaving university, Ruth Lapka earned her degree from the University of Portsmouth in 2004, and after a career in education and marketing is only now returning to her own creative practice. Her acrylic painting Pomus, Margate is a colourful evocation of the town’s resurgent spirit – all pot-plants and vintage tubular metal furniture. It’s one of a series of new paintings of cafes and interiors.

Equally colourful is Joanne Ursell’s Fuzzy Felt series, six child-like paintings of bowls of flowers that are on one hand fast, immediate and scrappy, but on the other are clearly well-considered.

Her larger painting, Interior No.5, being big and prominent, is something of a show-stealer, a mass of shape and colour in which a table, chair, and other obvious objects drift in and out of focus.

At the other end of the scale – literally – is Polly Benford’s incredibly moving work “This is my people’s last message” Bisan Owda. A Palestinian film-maker and journalist, who works with the UN and as an EU Goodwill Ambassador, Owda has won a Peabody Award and an Edward R. Murrow Award for her work, which both records the genocide in Gaza and explores Palestinian culture and history. Benford has drawn Owda’s portrait, and sealed it in wax – it sits on the wall as a physical object, like a religious icon. Benford has also included drawings of her children’s hands and feet in the exhibition.

So, there’s work of real emotional depth exploring international issues, alongside hyperlocal work that explores Margate today and our place in Plenty of the work is affordable – I very nearly bought a small painting.

Frntofhouse is a good reminder that, while the super-rich star artists take the headlines, Margate’s real creativity is much more egalitarian. When the town’s regeneration was originally planned, after all, creating a network of small studios and gallery spaces was seen to be as important as the big landmark gallery on the front, growing a new eco-system for visitors to encourage them to spend more time here. This exhibition loops right around, connecting the landmark and the landscape it sits in.

Frntofhouse is at the former Clayspace shop at 61 Northdown Road, open Friday 13th-Sunday 15th and Friday 20th-Sunday 22nd June, from 11am-4pm.