Art / Exhibitions
Art installation features giant periodic table of ‘imagined but plausible future’
At first glance, a unit in the ground floor of the Galleries might look like a pharmacy. In fact, this conceptual shop has become an art installation where visitors can walk away with a little piece of their own perfect world.
Utopian Chemistry features a giant periodic table “of an imagined but plausible future”.
It is the creation of David Goldblatt, who you will encounter in the shop dressed in a pharmaceutical white coat, encouraging you to choose your own element to join his own selections which range from hope to cycling, jazz to day dreams.
is needed now More than ever
Goldblatt is an award-winning author of sports books including The Ball Is Round which has been described the “seminal football history”.
This colourful art installation in a tired shopping centre might seem a world away from his day job of writer, broadcaster and academic, but Utopian Chemistry is not Goldblatt’s first art exhibition, having previously taken over a shop on Stokes Croft in 2011 to stage The Museum of Ivor Goldblatt featuring objects collected over the course of his late father’s life.
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In 2019, Goldblatt learned to do letterpress printing at the Letterpress Collective on Leonard Lane in the Old City.
“I got fed up with writing books, maybe I could make a book,” the 58-year-old, who lives in Bishopston, told Bristol24/7.
“This is a different bit of the brain being exercised but there is also just something in me that needs to do it. It didn’t feel like a hobby. It feels like a whole act of creation that I just absolutely need to be doing.”
A public exhibition of Goldblatt’s prints was held in early 2023 at Pitzer College in Los Angeles, where he is a visiting professor.
Goldblatt described the art scene as “still quite an intimidating world. How taste and judgement works within it, it’s a whole new terrain.
“I’m still learning techniques. Print, collage and installation is what I have come up with. And I definitely want to do them all again. There are other projects bubbling.”
Just a few of the elements chosen by David Goldblatt in Utopian Chemistry – photo: David Goldblatt
“I have always been incredibly disappointed by piss-poor comic periodic tables, like coffee or swearing. They are ugly and just not very good so I’ve always thought I would be able to do better,” said Goldblatt, who has got an A-level in chemistry.
“Another route to it is ‘keep calm and carry on’ which I absolutely can’t express just how much I hate. What I hate about those posters is the graphic language of Gill Sans and that look which used to belong to municipal socialism and London transport.
“That era of building the welfare state was commandeered and commercialised as ‘austerity is okay, we’ll get through it’. All the juxtapositions are so wrong so I slightly wanted to reclaim that.
“The last bit of – as we say in Yiddish, the megillah – the long story, is that I was a big fan of manifestos as a teenager… No-one reads manifestos anymore so I thought, what does a manifesto for the age of Instagram look like?
“So if you put all of those bits together and you swirl them around with a few joints and you start doodling, suddenly I started drawing these elements: okay, periodic table!
“At the same time I thought, how can I get this out there? And from all this big bag of stuff, an idea: make it a pharmacy. Utopian Chemistry. That’s it!”
Visitors to Utopian Chemistry can make their own element in their own version of utopia – photo: David Goldblatt
Visitors to the exhibition can make their own element in their own version of utopia, choosing the name, abbreviation and colour of their own element mimicking the style of the art work, which Goldblatt and his team can then create in the shop.
Goldblatt added: “Obviously, if you want more Tory governments, we reserve the right to put you in the radioactive elements, but otherwise you can have whatever you want.”
All of the new ideas – radioactive and otherwise – will also be added to the ‘people’s periodic table’.
Utopian Chemistry is open at the Galleries from Thursday to Sunday throughout November and December. For more information, visit www.feasibleutopias.org
Main photo: David Goldblatt
Read next:
- David Goldblatt: ‘I love the feeling, the collective cry, the rhythm of chanting, the pasties – all of it’
- New ‘immersive gallery’ to open in Bristol in 2024
- ‘Once-in-a-generation’ opportunity to redevelop the Galleries
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