BUMPER - Louise Ashcroft

BUMPER is a collection of videos, images and objects gathered through a week of fieldwork around Whitechapel on the UK’s hottest June days ever on record: A small dried fish from local shop Fish Bazaar is taken to meet endangered species in the Natural History Museum, like an odd bootleg of Finding Nemo; Ominous comic book speech bubbles are added to litter on a walk from Louise’s home to the gallery; A Twister ice lolly is melting in the Newsagents; Imprints in the tarmac left by years of market stall feet are monumentalised. Louise has chatted to Fishmongers, Shoe Sellers, Tailors, and Green Grocers, about their problems, their hopes and the tricks of the trade.
Heeding their advice, this new body of work has been made frugally and spontaneously from offcuts and observations, echoing the opportunistic foraging tactics of the pomfret, prawns and rohu fish suspended in deep-freezer time travel in Whitechapel Road’s specialist stores.
The show extends Louise’s nascent ‘resourceful sculpture’ methodology - a daily practice of making sculptural interventions as part of everyday life; wherever the artist is, in whatever time they’ve got and with whatever they’ve got to hand. Limitations incite novelty and escapism, whilst the spectre of ecological and economic crises linger, like bawdy and macabre jokes in true East End Music Hall tradition.
Supported by Goldsmiths, University of London.