After a day of set design, creative collaboration and artistic expression, Moki Cherry still had to cook dinner for the kids. Sure, she did it in an improvised kitchen in a museum, but she still had obligations.
Obligations that her husband and collaborator, the legendary jazz musician Don Cherry, was comparatively free of. That’s one of the main narratives of this show, the first of the Swedish designer and artist’s work in the UK. Her’s is the story of so many artist mothers, of domestic and creative work being intimately linked, but always done under constraints: ‘I was my husband’s muse, companion, and collaborator. At the same time, I did all the practical maintenance. I was never trained to be a female, so I survived by taking a creative attitude to daily life and chores.’
Cherry, who died in 2009, had an amazing psychedelic approach to colour: her tapestry portrait of Don reimagines him as a shimmering Hindu deity, her paintings swirl and curl and spin with eyes and lips exploding in neon yellows and greens and pinks. Lots of the work is fabric-based, inspired by her training as a fashion designer, and was used as set dressing for ambitious, weird, collaborative, hippy happenings. There’s heaps of esoteric philosophy, loads of Eastern spiritualism and endless, mind-bending colour.
The fabric works are great, but the handful of paintings here are the best. Just surreal, semi-abstract bursts of line and form and clashing hues.
None of it is that deep, it doesn't have any big overarching artistic concepts. Instead, the whole show feels like a post-Beatles, freeform meditation on living in the moment. It’s just an artist turning on, tuning in and dropping out, and then making dinner for the kids.