Pacific Art Festival & Disaster Trade exhibition

St Martin-in-the-Fields is currently hosting two climate-focused exhibitions. 

The Pacific Art Festival is a celebration of Pacific arts and culture in the lead up to COP26, running 9-24 October 2021, produced by Pacific Island Artists Connection and hosted by St Martin-in-the-Fields in London’s Trafalgar Square. This inaugural event brings together communities from Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea who are based in the Pacific region as well as the UK’s large Pacific diaspora. The festival is free and includes an art exhibition curated by the talented Sulu Daunivalu (Director, Museum of Pacific & Oceanic Art, Latvia), heritage arts and products, on-line panel discussions, interactive activities live-streamed with Fijian speakers and performers.

Showcasing both heritage and contemporary arts, including a wide variety of visual art that has never been shown before, the exhibition will take visitors on a journey across the Pacific region whilst highlighting the impact climate change is having on these small island nations and how Pacific communities are fighting back.

Many of the works on display are for sale and this income will directly assist Pacific Islanders who have been so badly affected by the COVID pandemic. A selection of artists showing in the exhibition include Nicolai Michoutouchkine, Irami Buli, John Danger and Robert Kua.

Additionally, see Disaster Trade, an exhibition which focuses on the hidden footprint of UK production overseas. As the UK prepares for COP 26, British politicians are lauding the UK’s success in reducing its carbon footprint. But all is not as it seems. As a new project, Disaster Trade reveals, the true global impact of the British economy is hidden from observers, but no less destructive for it.

Focusing on imports from Cambodia, Sri Lanka and the South Asian “brick belt”, this project exemplifies how British trade shapes the disasters that afflict the UK’s trading partners. Drawing on global quantitative data, personal testimonies and professional photography, it exposes how the UK’s trade in garments, bricks and tea serves to displace emissions and environmental degradation, whilst intensifying the impacts of natural hazards linked to climate change. Explore these issues with this exhibition.

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Karen Peris - A Song Is Way Above The Lawn.

Chinese Art for Western Interiors

On Thursday Colin Sheaf spoke at St Martin-in-the-Fields on 'Chinese Art for Western Interiors'. This was the second lecture in our occasional series of art talks focusing on aspects of Chinese Art; a series which is a joint initiative with our Chinese Congregations.

Linking Asian craftsmanship with evolving Western tastes in interior decoration and passion for Chinoiserie, the ‘China Trade’ facilitated the arrival in London of principally Chinese artefacts and traditions like tea-drinking, which greatly enriched English polite society between about 1600-1850. Colin's lecture explored this exotic yet fundamentally commercial maritime relationship, illustrating some of the fine lacquers, ‘Export-taste’ ceramics, silks and wallpapers which the ‘Honourable East India Company’ regularly imported.

Colin Sheaf has been Head of Asian Art at Bonhams since 2001. He has had a distinguished 37-year career in the auction industry after reading Modern History at Worcester College Oxford. A world authority on Asian ceramics and Chinese Art he directs Asian Art specialist teams on four continents, holding sales in London, Hong Kong, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. He is also Chairman of the Sir Percival David Foundation, the world's finest private collection of Imperial Chinese porcelain.

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Ding Yi Music Company - Moonlit River In Spring.