Protest Crowd, London (March against Brexit, 21 March 2019) (2019)

Joy Gerrard has been making images of mass protests since 2003, including anti-Iraq War demonstration in London, the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and more recently, the anti-Trump and anti-Brexit marches and Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Her arresting images are based on aerial perspective press images. We are used to images of crowds, taken from above to show their massive scale against recognisable landmarks. Gerrard’s treatment defamiliarises this trope. The colour of the source material is replaced by a funereal monochrome grey and white, with large flat black areas that seem to create ‘holes’ in the composition. Gerrard works with the canvas horizontally, reflecting the downward-looking perspective of her images, which shifts again once the painting is on the wall. She uses Japanese ink to create the dense blackness in her oeuvre and grinds the colour pigments herself.

Gerrard’s large-scale canvases blur the individual figures into abstract marks. Equally, the buildings in Protest Crowd, London, (March against Brexit, 21 March, 2019) are nondescript. Only the banner, ‘PUT IT TO THE PEOPLE’ indicates what we’re looking at. The painting reflects the ambiguity – even polarisation – within the anti-Brexit movement by depicting the movement of the crowd pulling in different directions. She also destabilises the surrounding architecture to reflect how Brexit has unbalanced our political structures. Brexit will have an enduring effect for generations and it is one of the most divisive issues of our time. Are the marchers in Protest Crowd contained by the streets or have they claimed them?

In recent years, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery has concentrated on collecting artists who address topics such as surveillance and the notion of the modern metropolis. It is within this thematic context that Joy Gerrard’s image, which reflects a new era of mass protest, enters the collection.

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