KURT JACKSON

Wheat from plough to plate

March 19 – August 14 2021

In this exhibition, Kurt Jackson traces the journey of a staple crop – wheat – from ‘field to fork’ through a range of media spanning paint, sculpture, poetry and film.

For many years the building that houses the Jackson Foundation Gallery was part of Warrens Bakery.

It was here that their lorries and other vehicles were serviced, repaired and maintained. Other areas were for storage. Great heaps and pallets of crated dry cake mix and other baking ingredients sat wrapped and waiting.

From here, forklift trucks darted back and forth taking their loads to the bakery up the road, where the sweet aromas of baking bread and cakes, sausage rolls and pasties emanated, perfuming the town, filling the streets. Warrens claimed to be the oldest pasty makers in Cornwall, and they have held this accolade for a long time before the company slowly shrank.

Once a major employer in town, now the bakery in St Just has gone.

I recognised the importance of Warrens in St Just before their demise started, and in 2012, for part of my This Place – St Just-in-Penwith project, I painted and drew inside the factory.

I sketched the lines of pasty crimpers working in their red plastic gowns and hats, a witness to their cheerful banter and humour as they chatted back and forth, across and up and down their conveyor belt. Their busy hands prepared and filled the dinner plate-sized pastry rounds, expertly crimping identical pasty after pasty.

I saw the trolleys loaded with decorative cakes, the saffron buns and heavy cake, loaves and loaves of white and brown bread. I then painted and made bronze sculptures of the pasties, celebrating this staple of Cornwall, this icon of Cornish heritage.

A few years later when the Foundation came about, it seemed relevant to continue on this theme – bread – and the rest of the process: the chain of events that lead from plough to plate, the wheat being grown and harvested in those green and golden fields, the grinding of the flour, the whole gamut.

Everywhere I went on my travels, wheat seemed to be grown. Sometimes on a huge industrial landscape scale and sometimes smaller, the odd field here or there. My eyes opened to its presence; I became aware of it.

The sharp emerald green of new growth transforming into summer’s blue-green beauty and then the ripe gold ready for harvest.

The massive combines, the quaint old machines still kept running, the vintage vehicles at the rallies, the threshing and thrashing. The stacks of bales, the stubble with flocks of rooks and gulls amassed above.”

Kurt Jackson: Wheat From Plough to Plate
March 19 – August 14 2021.
Jackson Foundation, St Just,
Cornwall, TR19 7LB.

Please check here for opening times.

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with Survival International, of which Kurt Jackson is an Ambassador.

During the run of Wheat, our Upstairs Gallery space will be exhibiting Echoes of a Vanished World, a beautiful selection of photographs by explorer and Survival International co-founder Robin Hanbury-Tenison.