Meat Market

Deptford's latest meat alternative

Meat, or what looks like it, hangs in the window of this former butcher’s, but it has a different kind of label – ‘Sophie Mei Birkin, they salted my carcass to keep me at sea’ – and there’s no obvious way to buy it. The Wellbeloveds sold meat (and pies) from this building for sixty years, and it’s still full of flesh, still macabre and appealing, though its current stock is more painting than prime cuts, more sculpture than slaughter, more Bacon than bacon. But at this month-long curatorial project, the main dish, the pièce de résistance (ok, I’ll stop) is the building itself.

As the name suggests, Meat Market refers back to the history of the Grade-II listed building on Tanner’s Hill, Deptford, where the show is taking place. The twelve artists now here were handed the baton by those who exhibited during the first ten days of Meat Market, allowing it to evolve beyond curator Sophie Nowakowska’s control. But the building’s atmosphere is overpowering, and the butcher’s presence is ingrained deeply enough to mould any newcomers into its shape whether they like it or not.

It’s partly the smell. It would take more than scrubbing to get it out of the walls of the hanging room, and the artists respond to it. Anna Mays installs a sound work, a reminder of what happened before and after the dead animals took up residency on the ceiling hooks. A speaker plays the sound of a beating heart mixed with crackles and industrial sounds, recalling the process of slaughter, and perhaps also cooking. In an old sink nearby is Elizabeth Rose Alster’s model of a human head, which frets, like a chicken, over what it has become: A Body That Has Left Me? A Lost Head?

Elizabeth Rose Alster, A Body That Has Left Me? A Lost Head?

A dark room at the back has encouraged Cristiano Di Martino to insert spikes into the walls, skewering delicate etching plates that announce: The Skin is a Veil. Upstairs, a trio of deft pencil drawings by Louis Blue Newby, accompanied by the phrases ‘terrible urges’, ‘Open it up’ and ‘fierce enlargements’, refer to penetration without any pretence of bodily concealment. Correspondingly, a hole has been knocked out of the thin wall. There is rubble in the crumbling fireplace. In this cramped room, through the uneven floorboards, the old brickwork and older wallpaper, you start to intuit the presence of yet more occupants of the building, who long predate even the Wellbeloveds.

Another wooden staircase, narrow and winding, leads to the last room at the very top. Having seen the rest of the show, I was braced for a shock. What I got was mockery, a painting of a grinning mouth rasping on two kazoos: ‘Huuummm zzzzzzz’. (Grace Lee, Fool Me Twice.) As if you expected some kind of conclusion, you silly sausage. The house is in charge, and it will reveal to the artists, and the audiences, exactly as much as it wants to, and no more.

Grace Lee, Fool Me Twice

Meat Market runs from 11 May to 4 June 2023 at 31 Tanner’s Hill, Deptford, London.