STEWART HOME: HALLUCINATION GENERATION: HIGH MODERNISM IN A TRIPPED OUT WORLD. 26 April - 1 May 2006. Arnolfini, Bristol.

List of Works

1. LIght Studio
Twenty-Seven Portraits of Terry Taylor, Ida Kar, c.1961
(After the exhibition Stewart Home discovered slightly more than half these photos were from 1961 and the rest from circa 1956; however the less accurate dating of 'circa 1961' supplied by the National Portrait Gallery was used for all the works on the visitor information available during the show)

Untitled Ceramics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Francis Morland c. 2000 - 2002

Spring, Francis Morland, c.1965 Fibreglass

Kiss, Francis Morland, 1965, Fibreglass

Alexander Trocchi, London, 1967, Photograph by Wallace Berman, Posthumous gelatin silver print (2004), Courtesy of RoseGallery/Estate of Wallace Berman

Allen Ginsberg and Wallace Berman, Topanga Canyon, 1971, Photograph by
Wallace Berman, Posthumous gelatin silver print (2004), Courtesy RoseGallery/Estate of Wallace Berman

Tainted Love Radio Show, 2005, Audio 60 mins, Written by Stewart Home, Mixed by Nigel Ayers, voice by Alice Parkinson, Introduction by Leslie Ayers

A Small selection of Stewart Home ’s research material comprising of thirty-five paperback books, one magazine, four newspapers, one CND mini-poster, and a copy of Stewart Home’s novel Tainted Love.

Three film posters Casino Royale, Performance and Spy with a Cold Nose

2. Dark Studio
The Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Oedipus Complex, Stewart Home, 2004
DVD 41 mins (Please note this film will not be shown between 2pm-8pm on Sunday 30 April)

3. Gallery 5
Composition in Red, Francis Morland, c.1967, Galvanised Steel

Imperfect History, Aquarius Rising, Family Constellation Part 1, Stewart Home, 2006, Wall Text

Prank Calls to Prostitutes, Stewart Home, 1997, Audio 15 mins (Please note this piece contains sexually explicit references)

Becoming (M)other, Photographic Morphs, 2004, Stewart Home and Chris Dorley-Brown, utilising photographs of Julia Callan-Thompson taken by Carla Hopkins in 1966.

Stewart Home and Arnolfini would like to thank Tosh Berman (Tam Tam Books), Michael Connor (BFI), Clare Freestone (National Portrait Gallery), Kristine McKenna, Lucy Morland, Snoozie, Jack, Chris, Julian and Peter (Arnolfini), Vintage Magazine Co.

Related Events
Stewart Home Talk Weds 26 7pm. £5/£3 concs.

Double Bill Screening Introduced by Stewart Home Sun 30 April. £5/£3.50 concs. Performance (18) 3pm + More (18) 5.30pm.

Introduction to the exhibition
The history of the sixties is a labyrinth, and there are many different ways in which one might make one's way through it. I thought that for someone of my age (I was born in 1962), I knew the sixties pretty well, but when I started looking into the life and death of my mother (Julia Callan-Thompson 1944-1979), from whom I'd been separated as a baby, I realised I still had a lot to learn. This exhibition includes some works I have made inspired by my mother, and others that relate to the milieu in which she moved. In 1960 at the age of sixteen, my mother left Newport in south Wales for London. She immediately immersed herself in the Soho beatnik scene of the time. Her involvement with drugs enabled her to get close to the writers Alex Trocchi and William Burroughs, and through them she got to meet one of her great beat heroes, the poet Allen Ginsberg. My mother worked as a hostess in Murray's Cabaret Club alongside Profumo Affair scandal girl Christine Keeler, and also appeared as an extra in films such as Accident, Casino Royale, Becket and Spy With A Cold Nose. She also did brief stints as a fashion model but drug dealing was a much more regular source of income for her. In this exhibition I wanted to focus on a couple of men whose names repeatedly came up in conversations with people who'd known my mother, but of whom I’d have probably never heard had I not decided to investigate my own past. They are Terry Taylor and Francis Morland.

Terry Taylor has to date been treated as a very minor figure within the history of youth culture despite the key role he played in London’s sixties drug underground. Described by Tony Gould as 'unconventionally successful', Taylor was for a time chiefly of interest to cultural historians because characters in the Colin MacInnes novels Absolute Beginners and Mr Love and Justice had been based to a greater or lesser extent upon him. In 1956 MacInnes introduced Taylor to photographer Ida Kar and he became her lover for a few years. Simultaneously Taylor worked as Kar’s photographic assistant and she encouraged him to paint. After getting his drug novel Baron’s Court, All Change published in 1961. Taylor went to Tangier in 1963 to work on a follow-up. While away he smoked a lot of weed and hung out with a variety of fellow psychedelic explorers including William Burroughs (author, it should not be forgotten, of The Yage Letters as well as Junky).

In his memoir Journey Around an Extraordinary Planet, American poet Johnny Dolphin describes how he got heavily involved in a magic group formed by Terry Taylor and various Berbers which met in Tangier to materialize thought forms: "Each one would concentrate, projecting his inner scene. The one with the most power would make the scene that would take over the night in the Magic Room. That one would have made the greatest magic. I learned how to measure power. Terry, lean, deft and poised, prepared the kief from the dried plants, carefully selected from the Berber women’s stocks. Then he would pass out the majoom cookies [...] We sat backs to the wall in silence focusing on making the scene appear." These rituals were destined to be repeated in London, albeit with a different group of ‘initiates’. Intimating a little of what was to come, Dolphin writes: "Terry wanted to turn all London on and later helped start the process with street acid together with his tall, thin-nosed call-girl friend from Chelsea."

Taylor introduced my mother to Detta Whybrow, the woman Dolphin describes as Taylor’s 'call-girl friend', and with others they formed a magic group in west London. At first they'd get stoned on grass before doing their materializing thought form magic rituals, but this being the mid-sixties inevitably it wasn't long before they'd graduated to acid. For my mother, Detta and most of the others involved in Taylor's London magic group, these visionary sessions with LSD proved to be extremely intense and so they started to damp things down between their occult experiments by smoking a bit of heroin. In a number of instances this chasing of the dragon eventually escalated into intravenous drug use. My mother made her first attempt at coming off heroin in 1967, and although there were periods when she didn't use smack, she suffered relapses into addiction until she died in 1979. Detta, I understand, succeeded in getting off and staying off heroin some time before her death in the 1990s. Terry Taylor gave it all up and moved to north Wales where in the 1970s he dropped from view to raise a family (and according to rumour, perfect his use of magic in secret). I understand that the bulk of his writings, paintings and photographs are lost. Most of the 27 Ida Kar portraits of Taylor from 1961 exhibited here are receiving their first public airing.

Moving on, in the sixties Francis Morland was a London art world insider with a teaching job in the sculpture department at St Martin's College. His mother, Dorothy Morland, had been director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Morland's work in bronze of the early sixties was well received. An anonymous Times critic covering the Sculptors of Today exhibition at the Bear Lane Gallery in Oxford: praised him for ‘distinguished modelling coupled with imaginative insight’ (11 May 1962). The following year, alongside David Hockney, Joe Tilson, Peter Blake, Allen Jones and Derek Boshier, he appears in Gerald Laing's photograph London Artists in Paris; this was taken during the Paris Biennale des Jeunes. 1963 was a key year for Morland, since he moved from working in bronze to using fibreglass finished in coats of cellulose paint.

When writing about Morland’s contribution to The New Generation 1966 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in Studio International, P. Procktor said of this change of direction: “Comparing the new work with the old there can be few transformations of style more radical. The break is complete. These large entwining serpentine shapes relate to the work of other sculptors in this idiom, speak in a sculptural language which is familiar because it is to a certain extent a shared language. What interests me is not the grammatical principles of the language nor who invented them, one can safely assume that Morland did not, but what this language is used to say. Kiss, the only title of the four pieces in the exhibition which has a specific human connotation, provides a clue to all. The twisting and entwining shapes are metaphors of the body, headless, limbless, featureless, but miming the poses of relaxation or sexual intercourse like gigantic strings of macaroni...”

1966 was to prove another turning point in Morland's life, since it was then that he was introduced to one of my mother’s close friends who was a drug smuggler. Morland was unable to support himself from the sale of his work, and keen to find alternative sources of income. Once he’d been introduced to the drug scamming game, he realised that one of the ways he might smuggle hash was to seal it inside his large fibreglass sculptures, a small hole which could be replugged was all that was required to get the dope in and out of his art works. Many years down the line this ploy was imitated by Howard Marks, who substituted Morland’s modernist constructions with the speaker systems used by rock bands. To Morland smuggling was a means of subsidising his real passion, making art. In the late sixties Morland's work appeared in group shows such as New British Sculpture organised by the Arnolfini Gallery at outdoor locations in Bristol and the 1st Burleighfield Sculpture Exhibition at Burleighfield House, Loudwater, Bucks (both 1968). Morland’s one person show Recent Sculpture opened on 12 September 1969 at the Axiom Gallery, London W1.

Morland's first bust occurred in October 1969, hot on the heels of his Axiom show. The art world reacted with horror, seeing taking drugs as one thing and smuggling them as quite another. Morland's career as a professional sculptor came to an abrupt halt, and he was dropped by many of his professional friends. The charges against him took some time to wend their way to a conclusion in the courts but The Times dutifully covered this on 23 March 1971 under the heading ‘Diplomats In Drug Ring, Crown Says’. Morland failed to answer his bail so he wasn't actually up before the beak. Others not present were a Mr Khaled and Fulton Dunbar, Third Secretary at the Liberian Embassy in Rome. Morland and Dunbar were said to have made statements admitting their guilt and that of others. It was claimed the gang smuggled £150,000 worth of cannabis into the UK, and had plans to ship a lot more around the world. In the dock was Robert Paul Palacios who used his catamaran to transport the drugs from Morocco to Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, from where he drove them to London in a Rolls-Royce car. Palacios who’d been hired to do the job by Morland was fined £4000.

Morland began his first jail sentence for smuggling in America. After sailing his 47 foot ketch loaded with hash from Morocco to the US in July 1971 and being caught upon entry, he was jailed for eight years and fined $15,000. The Times tersely covered Morland's second bust on 4 June 1972 under the headline ‘London Man Jailed in US Drug Case’: After doing time for these first two ‘crimes’, Morland was next nicked attempting to land cannabis worth £3.5 million in northern Scotland. When he was jailed for nine years and had assets of more than £232,000 confiscated, The Times of 25 June 1991 covered the case under the headline ‘Drug Smuggler – Francis Morland’: Unfortunately this 1989 bust was not his last, nor did the 1991 judgement result in his final stiff sentence. A proper reassessment of Morland's career and contribution to British art is long overdue.
Stewart Home, April 2006.

A thinly fictionalised version of Julia Callan-Thompson’s life can be found in the novel Tainted Love by Stewart Home, available from Arnolfini Bookshop. For further information on Stewart Home and his mother Julia Callan-Thompson visit www.stewarthomesociety.org

This guide is intended as an introduction to the exhibition. Please feel free to ask stewards any questions you have.

Arnolfini
16 Narrow Quay
Bristol BS1 4QA
T: 0117 917 2300
F: 0117 917 2303
E: info@arnolfini.org.uk
www.arnolfini.org.uk

Selected older Stewart Home art exhibitions Becoming (M)other London (2004/5) and Vermeer II, London (1996)