David Medalla, 'Tea at Twilight'
In: A Quality of Light: a collaborative visual arts event. Penzance: St. Ives International, 1997, pp. 71-72
Last Night I dreamt I went to Manderley again ...
Daphne Du Marier, Rebecca
David Medalla calls himself a transcendental hedonist. His spirit, it has been said, 'is airborne, but every once in a while alights like a mythical bird, flutters about doing serious reconnaissance, and departs, leaving a feather or two'.
Born in Manila in the Philippines in 1942, Medalla settled in London in 1960 and has since been a prolific artist, straddling diverse approaches and media from painting and kinetic sculpture to performances, happenings and a wide variety of collaborative events. Although his work has been widely seen in Europe and the USA, many of his most subversive and playful artistic experiments have not been recorded or given institutional support.
If one can ever be sure just when or where a work of David Medalla's really begins, the conception of his Tea at Twighlight can be fixed fairly confidently to a particular moment in time. It began, typically, out of the everyday, out of conversation; coalescing almost imperceptibly over breakfast on a glorious late summer morning in the dining-room of the Blue Hayes Hotel in St Ives. This room, as the artist recalls, existed in a state of impossible perfection: floral displays, window-sill ornaments, tables laid with polite attention to detail, the random notes of china cups touched on saucers, murmurs of satisfaction. And surrounding this, a deep blue crystal sea refracted a warm and penetrating light.
This was a mythic scene of porcelain beauty, a fiction in which the artist had taken his place. Fantasy, nostalgia and a hint of reality were all combined into one glistening tableau through which wove the singular narrative thread of a 'quality of light.'
Returning to St Ives for the first time since the early 1960s, when he participated in fierce local artistic debates, Medalla saw in this mythic space a framework within which issues related to place, tradition, history and art could be explored. And, importantly, this space also had its shadow, a negative polarity of darkness: magic tales, stories of shipwrecks, smugglers, nature's vengeful power unleashed against a craggy coastline. This is the setting for Daphne Du Maurier's stories of gothic suspense.
Tea at Twighlight is created through encounters between Medalla, fellow artist and collaborator Adam Nankervis, and the people of St Ives. Bringing together elements of video, painting and found ephemera, the work is part performance, part alchemical reaction, part bizarre social survey. The work imagines lives caught up in interlocking fables, and lived through the aspirations and disenchantments of recent Cornish history. [DC]