Vinegar & Piss

By Theo Weiss

In Vinegar & Piss, the Margate-based sculptor Dominic Watson has constructed a hulking, life-sized galleon in the lower floor of The Sunday Painter gallery in Vauxhall. The ship is fashioned from reclaimed children’s playhouses salvaged from across southeast England, and inside its hull visitors can walk among a motley yet strangely charming crew, all formed from papier-mâché and wax: a grinning sailor with curly locks sporting a false nose and with custard tarts for nipples; a baldheaded seaman seemingly trapped in the belly of the ship; a collection of suspended feet in oversized shoes belonging to unseen figures dangling from trapdoors and climbing ladders and, at the back of the hull, a humungous bald head vomiting a slurry of lurid yellow filth, in which custard cream biscuits, somehow still perfectly intact, are in the process of being regurgitated.

"a visceral expression of nostalgic lunacy"

The show begins not at the gallery entrance, but via a small door in the ship’s side. From there, Watson’s careful control of his subject becomes clear. Although at first glance an absurd spectacle, full of crude figures and infantile vulgarity,  Vinegar & Piss skewers a thriving and regressive nostalgia within the English imagination for a lost ‘golden age’ in which English galleons ruled the waves and an Englishmen’s desire was his destiny. By deploying a kind of lewd, irreverent humour and making use of rough and easily breakable materials – including polystyrene, papier-mâché, and repurposed playhouses - Watson exposes the patent ridiculousness of such a hankering for a lost age of glory and lampoons its misplaced appeal in the present. The vomiting figure becomes a kind of visceral expression of this nostalgic lunacy, the clambering figures a metaphor for social unrest. Instead of a voluptuous mermaid, Watson has added a screaming maiden to the ship’s bow, with two ominously empty breast pumps and a helmet made from a garden pot and overturned broom, the symbol of a nation that has much vim and vigour but little chance of triumph. As the exhibition text bluntly puts it, the show is 'a portrait of contemporary England', of a nation 'adrift, run aground, and in decline.'

Watson’s adrift ship and his nods to an illusory state of glory bring to mind another English galleon, docked just a couple of miles from his. Bobbing in the water alongside the Thames close to Borough Market is a 1970s replica of the sixteenth century galleon The Golden Hinde, the ship that English explorer and state-sanctioned pirate Francis Drake sailed around the world in the late sixteenth century. This replica was built, much like Watson’s, as a monument to English ingenuity and daring. Sailed around the world until the mid 1990s in a sort of cosplay of Drake’s voyage, the ship was then anchored at the heart of Britain’s imperial capital. Today, the Golden Hinde is overshadowed by mid-tier restaurants and ye-olde chain pubs and besieged year-round by stag-dos and binge-drinking. Yet the Hinde and other English galleons like it have once again become symbols of lost glory and faded imperial dreams. Watson and Drake’s ships speak to the same paradox at the heart of today’s revived nationalism: of a hazy, half imagined and elusive splendour amid the disappointing realities of the present. The only difference is that Watson’s ship, unlike Drake’s, has been fashioned from Wendy houses and its crew are made of paper and polystyrene. 

"a strangely timeless and magisterial aura"

Like much of Watson’s work,  Vinegar & Piss is concerned with Englishness and its follies. The show is playfully satirical rather than excoriating. Watson’s sculptures draw attention to the values that people invest in certain symbols - ships, ornate figureheads, custard creams - and turn such associations on their head. At the back of the ship, three ceramic heads of chainmail-clad knights sit solemnly on plinths, their faces covered in Houndstooth and other English patterns. These knights also made an appearance in some of Watson’s previous shows, including Cucumber Season at Folkestone’s Strange Cargo and God Bless Strawberry Jam at Cob Gallery. They draw on the peculiarly English symbolism of medieval statues: each bears a solemn expression and a chainmail coif – or headdress – typically found in churches or grand stately settings. Each face has a metal nose, a reference to pilgrims who used to make impressions of various body-parts in order to achieve proximity to greatness (here, the three noses are taken from the statues of notable Englishmen). The statues have a strangely timeless and magisterial aura that contrasts with the playful atmosphere in the ship’s hull: when you see it in the dim light of the gallery’s upper floor, so, too, does the vessel as a whole.

In its oddness and its charged atmosphere, Vinegar & Piss has clear affinities to the immersive, site-specific works of fellow British sculptor Mike Nelson. But Watson’s sensibility in this show is more obviously English, his sculptures chiming with the biting political satire of James Gillray, the unnerving gaudiness of Jake and Dinos Chapman, or even the absurdity of TV shows like Spitting Image. Against a backdrop of resurgent nationalism, Vinegar & Piss’s examination of Englishness – and its willingness to be both silly and serious about it – feels particularly timely.