The Magic Money Tree @
St Anne’s House
Review

In a festival centered around the movements of a city, ‘The Magic Money Tree’ is more about a stagnation. England is the world’s 6th largest economy, as promotional material for the exhibition reminds us. Yet across the country, poverty is a daily reality for so many. The choices made to bring this documentation of the cost-of-living crisis to exhibition form have been made with care. Both what is chosen to be exhibited and how the work is displayed work together to elevate the power of the images themselves. We can only hope the sharpening of this instrument will render it more effective in bringing about the changes this country desperately needs.

The effects of the cost-of-living crisis and the lives of those most affected by it are inextricably tied to the apathetic governance that has enabled austerity and the crisis to occur. This association exists from the outset; the title being taken directly from Theresa May’s speech in 2017. It continues through the presence of a rejected bill from the MP Zara Sultana requesting an extension of the free-school meals program which would save countless threatened lives. The bureaucracy which stands- not passively but abusively- in the way of the elimination of poverty in the UK, sits limply under glass in its paper form. Having this object and these ideas sit alongside the main body of the work supports a notion which is constant in Kirsty’s oeuvre, that people’s lives are shaped by the environments they exist within and cannot be judged in isolation from them.

Alongside the main body of portraits and street photographs lie landscapes which contextualize austerity as a part of an unjust and uneven geographic reality. I was lucky enough to take part in a social documentary workshop with Kirsty during the exhibition’s opening period. I asked about the presence of the landscapes which, although beautiful, felt less immediately impactful. Rather than images made to stand up on their own, the artist emphasized how they sit alongside the portraits, gently reminding the audience to connect the tales of the participants with the wider world they exist within. They are there because they are as much a part of the picture of these people’s lives as their portraits alone can be.

At times Kirsty moves the lens out of the way to represent what she feels cannot be sensitively handled by the medium of photography. Lining the top of the windows around the room are painted the answers to the question ‘What did you have to eat last night?’ which Kirsty posed to her participants. The answers are short, short in length and short of what any human being would needs to survive, but their presence in the room is felt deeply. More importantly than achieving a gut-punch reaction, they are ethically sensitive and considerate of the human beings behind the answers. Where her photographs are effective at capturing the full, empathetic picture of an identity in crisis, her use of text is employed when there is a need to punctuate the true violence of the crisis.

The way in which work by participants, rather than the artist’s, are given precedence in the space does well to underline the ‘social’ aspect of Kirsty’s social documentary practice. At the back of the room is where the balance of environmental and governmental impact is most deftly balanced with individual agency. The largest print on the wall is not a photograph by the artist, but an image made by a young participant of one of her workshops. Speaking with Kirsty, she chose this image as the most important of the whole body. Only the quartz dates inform the separation between the art of the artist and the art of the subjects, in this way the power of representation is beautifully shared. The poster from within the image hangs alongside, imbedding a tactility to this exhibition that asserts the urgency and continuance of the fight against austerity.

The captions too, detailed and personal paragraphs pasted on the walls, seem to me an act of empathy and understanding which set out a clear distinction between Kirsty’s practice and the traditional documentary genre. One caption has had a name redacted since the install. Within something as solid and curated as an exhibition space, a line of black marker scribbled over a name could be seen as something to be desperately avoided. But when human lives are being intimately portrayed during a time of crisis, the space has been made flexible to fit with the impermanence of the situations.

The exhibition space is opened to create a sense of interlinked narratives, lives which run parallel to each other despite geographical distance. Thin wooden rails hang the work across the middle of the room and allow every image to exist in a shared visual network. While there is some separation of the different locations to aid the cohesion of the work, the walls all work in tandem with each other. It would be difficult, as the viewer, to turn yourself in a way where you did not see multiple collections of work at once. As well as reinforcing the collective responsibility of all humans, the connectivity of the work helps to soften some of the heavy emotional burden that the individual stories would otherwise carry.

There is a thread being followed throughout the work, a line of truth, beset on each side by the potential to fall off into simplification or sensationalism. ‘Things in the exhibition exist on the line, and either side of it’ Kirsty said of the work. I think the resounding success of this work lies in its ability to recognize the complexity of the ethical landscape but to attempt to navigate it nonetheless. Especially when it comes to exhibiting social documentary work, there is the potential for all the sensitivity and care of the process to become erased by a heavy-handed production. But here, through thorough attention to detail, the underlying humanity of the work carries through to the end.

Tess Foley

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