The Wyllieum

THE UPSTAIRS BASEMENT

As well as being our community making space, The Upstairs Basement plays host to exhibitions by local artists.

FROM 6TH SEPTEMBER 2024

John Moody

Clyde Suite (Littoral Home)

Direct from his debut exhibition at Glasgow Print Studio, Port Glasgow based artist John Moody’s collection  of works will be on show in the Upstairs Basement for the month of September.

Photographs and sketches captured over 37 years inspire this exhibition.

Some of these images were developed from snapshots, all taken from the same location above Port Glasgow. An estuarial view, just before the river Clyde enters the deeper, colder waters of the Firth. The images echo through towering windows, on two levels of a late 19th century house.

These prints hint at confinement as if behind panes of glass to reflect the exclusion of mental illness. Window glass does not create sharp photographs. But as in Poet Sylvia Plath’s only published novel The Bell Jar, it does shut off the outside world. Like Esther, the main protagonist in Plath’s novel, John can feel he is “sitting under the same glass bell jar stewing in my own sour air” in front of an almost impossible beauty.

The poems are a response to John’s mental state while photographing and sketching. Sometimes they mirror tension in repetitive urban and industrial development. The backdrop is a traditional landscape painting, dominated by the awkward proportions of the old Port Glasgow Municipal Building. A retail park and a supermarket have replaced shipyards and a Goliath of a crane. Leaving the consolation of a beguiling perspective that changes slowly over a lifetime, the mountains and estuary changing over time scales far beyond John’s brief life.

John wrote most of the poems during a tense period of pandemic seclusion. Reaching for wellbeing against a symphony of poetry and chiaroscuro colours. Then woven in a tapestry and given poignancy during the first warm spring of the pandemic.

Reflected in these images and poems is an entity (Port Glasgow) grown over 250 years. Sometimes withered by the toxins of economic deprivation, it is still a vibrant community. In poetic lines, John describes the scene below as “the Littoral Zone” or shoreline, with Port Glasgow’s town centre crowding the shore. Ecologically, littoral zone describes life – which grows, deposits itself and lives on the shore.

Screenprints, collages and digital collages are arranged in tight grids. They express the tension of repetition. An attempted integration of urban and natural forms.

John attended Sunderland Art College from 1972 to 1976, where he was first introduced to screenprinting.

He spent nine years teaching art in Inverclyde secondary schools. He followed this with a varied career in community development, politics, literacy, physical disability and mental health. This took him all over Scotland and as far afield as Adelaide and Philadelphia, promoting recovery from mental illness with the Scottish Recovery Network.

Since then, he has returned to art as his first love. He undertook courses at the Glasgow Print Studio in screen-printing and has relied on the formidable array of experience and talent at the print studio to remind him of the power of emotional health and well-being generated while creating images.

John has been publishing poetry since 2019.

John is grateful to fellow writer, Stephen Eric Smith for his exhaustive critique of the Clyde Poems.