Racheal Crowther, 'Qualified to Care'
Ginny on Frederick, Smithfield, December 3 2022 - January 15 2023
In Britain the closest thing we have to a public religion is the NHS, a point made clear by the 2021 census that showed that Christians are now a minority group. Visit Qualified to Care, however, and you’ll be forgiven for thinking that you’ve walked into a brand-new chapel in the heart of London; then you realise that it is in fact an art installation in a tiny former sandwich bar next to Smithfield meat market. Nonetheless, the atmosphere of religion persists.
A green pharmacy sign, salvaged from somewhere in Lewisham, is placed upright on the tiled floor. Like the gallery itself – Ginny on Frederick – it is a relic of a defunct business, repurposed for art. Artist Racheal Crowther has reprogrammed the LED display to show footage of Queens Road Day Centre, a care provider for neurodiverse adults in Peckham, taken before and after its closure in 2018. As far as you can tell from the obscure images, the day centre was simply abandoned, objects and furniture left as they were in the building when the service users and workers left for the last time. Qualified to Care is therefore the gravestone of this organisation.
The gravestone is enhanced by its play with and against the idea of the holy relic. Relics are special because of their provenance: they once formed a part of something, or, usually, someone, holy. But the pharmacy had nothing to do with the day centre; they weren't even in the same borough. Eliding the demise of both into one object, Qualified to Care laments something broader: the decline of public healthcare, perhaps, or the careless attitude of the government, even the public, towards the most vulnerable.
It was only following the Protestant critiques of relic culture that the Catholic church began to meticulously label and catalogue their relics, to prove their authenticity. Before that, faith mattered more than facts. Crowther makes a similarly Counter-Reformation effort to research the origins of her media, but the artwork’s eagerness to make a general statement is more indebted to the laissez-faire, medieval attitude, where an aura can be passed from object to object, sustained by the belief of worshippers rather than evidence. Inserting the images of the day centre into the relic of the pharmacy, Qualified to Care fuses not only their forms but their origins.
This sleight of hand casts both pharmacy and day centre as martyrs in the same struggle for decent healthcare, the ideal we hold most dear, which is under attack by the government. The exhibition is solemn but not despondent. The cross is a symbol of death, but also of resurrection: a note of hope (not the same thing as optimism) amidst the wreckage we’re living in. The fact that it works shows how little resistance we have to the power of relics (hence the Protestants' fear). But there is no need to resist this secular relic, this mystery-less religion, because it is so clearly a good thing.