Pigeon Park 2

Manor Place Warehouse, Walworth, 18 - 25 September 2022

Cast your eyes up to the light that streams through the gabled roof, plays in the rafters and illuminates the enormous, time-worn edifice. For a week, artists' collective Pigeon Park turn this former Victorian bath house into something resembling a giant cathedral, filling it with a group of sculptures that resonate with its gothic atmosphere, mixing the vertical and spindly with the dark and mysterious, buffoonery with old-time pastoral. But as far as I could see, no pigeons.

 Straight out of a country church, a sense of remembrance is introduced near the door by three worn and faded Union Jack tabards, The Three Stooges by Jonny Banger, that hang on steel poles, like Christ and the two thieves on their crucifixes. The crosses and the limp bodies transform the past glories evoked by the flags into a mood of death and defeat, their hoods drooping in shame.

The Three Stooges, 2022, Jonny Banger

In the nave (let's say), there is a tall sculpture, Cairn, by Olivia Bax, as full of the memories of modernism as a disused Soviet space probe. Painted yellow and blue, it reaches upwards as if to transmit prayers to Ukraine, re-purposed for modernity's grim aftermath. The wartime theme continues further along, where there's Jo Dennis's garden bomb shelter, with a questionable fringe of earth and a curtain over the door, which you can pass through into the darkness.

This must be the crypt. The horribleness of the interior is mitigated by some purple lights and reflective paint, enough to make it bearable. It becomes a space for reflection, somewhere between a martyr's tomb and a teenager's hideaway. Though physically claustrophobic, it produces a calm and meditative state. 

Dominating the end of the basilica is Hung Out to Dry, a vast cylindrical assemblage by Christopher Stead. In place of the conventional canvas altarpiece, it seems to have been constructed from the canvas rags from the edges of all the old, discarded ones. It hovers above the ground, very still - could it be given more slack? - and intense against the rose window above. As you examine it, a lovely smell emanates over from a house nearby that's made of haystacks. The Dovecote by Abigail Hampsey and Georg Wilson is oddly mute to look at - you can peep in but there's nothing there - but it contributes a warming, agrarian incense.

Nearby you'll find a video of holy fool William Cobbing, bashing in his own clay head in eccentric penitence, his prayers leaking out in otherworldly pink and green paint. Otherwise, he's massaging a damp set of hands that protrude all around his head, which, though inscrutable to a layperson, surely contains a deep spiritual significance. Though they appear crude, his effigies and ex-votos stand out with their bluntness and charisma - and humility is pleasing to God.

Abigail Hampsey and Georg Wilson, The Dovecote, 2022, William Cobbing, Headspace I, 2022, Christopher Stead, Hung Out to Dry, 2022

Still looking for the pigeons, I finally realise that they're invisible. I get it. The pigeon symbolises the holy spirit, the force (curatorial?) that governs the church. Near comprehensive though never explicit in its ecclesiology, Pigeon Park 2 appears to be the product of a strong religious impulse. Perhaps this is true more generally. Contemporary art is characterised by practical uselessness, mystery and concern with the transformation of matter (miracles): where else do these come from?