Melanie Honebone - Love Tokens and Bad Pennies

Bad Penny by Melanie Honebone

Does love endure forever? Does a bad penny always turn up? During this Valentine month the artists and writers from CollectConnect explore this flip-sided theme with an exhibition of 32 miniature sculptures. These objects are placed in public places (#unsettledgallery), helping us to remember those who we hold dear - or cast off those who we would rather forget. Every day throughout February we will be featuring one of these tokens/pennies on this website. A writer will also use the art as inspiration to create something new and fresh.

Artist - Melanie Honebone / Words -  Dean Reddick

Hyper-rational love 

'Love isn't a coin that can be saved or spent.'
Her words come back to me now, as they often do in such moments when I pause for breath or courage.
She was always so sure.
She never bartered her love, or her hate for that matter, not like me.

My thumb inevitably caresses the token in the pocket of my travel-dusted jeans.
'Ugly little man,' that's my name for it; the curves and hollows of its face familiar, like the feel of my teeth inside my mouth.

I step back onto the path, not nearly finished this journey, and already despondent and soul weary.
She'd always wanted to travel.

I wish she were with me now.

Melanie's Bad Penny on a way marker at

 the #unsettledgallery in Epping Forest

Epping Forest is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, bordering London and Essex and is an Ancient Woodland, one of the few left in London. The sculptor Jacob Epstein lived on the edge of the Forest. Nowadays the Forest is used by dog walkers, mountain bikers, horse and pony riders and picnicking friends and families as well as footballers, bird watchers and runners. I like to imagine all the lovers who might have left their own love tokens in the forest over the centuries. The Forest has also had its share of Bad Pennies reaching up to the present day.
Take a walk through the Forest and see if you can find a Love Token or a Bad Penny.

Melanie Honebone has been known to us as Melanie Ezra up until last year when she got married. Congratulations to Melanie and her husband! We look forward to continuing our long creative relationship.

Melanie is a Wales-based fine artist who works using her own original photographs to create beautiful and intricate collages. She often works in series, providing visual responses to external stimuli such as literature, science, and music. She considers herself a specialist in the deconstruction of time and the extension of the moment. Recently Melanie has been creating videos with Stone Letter Media. Honebone openly describes herself as a ‘renegade arts experimentalist’ and is happy dabbling in anything that pushes her work to the limit and broadens her own potential.
https://melaniehonebone.wordpress.com/

Dean Reddick is an artist, an art therapist, occasional lecturer and editor on the Art Therapy Journal ATOL. He has a small studio space at his home in Walthamstow where he works on sculptures and drawings often based on his fascination with birds and trees. 

Don't forget to submit to our next exhibition. The Art of Caring is accepting submission until the 7th April 2019. More HERE.

Stella Tripp - Love Tokens and Bad Pennies

Stella Tripp

Does love endure forever? Does a bad penny always turn up? During this Valentine month the artists and writers from CollectConnect explore this flip-sided theme with an exhibition of 32 miniature sculptures. These objects are placed in public places (#unsettledgallery), helping us to remember those who we hold dear - or cast off those who we would rather forget. Every day throughout February we will be featuring one of these tokens/pennies on this website. A writer will also use the art as inspiration to create something new and fresh.

Artist - Stella Tripp / Words -  Rebecca Lowe

All Things Are Connected

Love is a house
And in the house is a room
And in the room is a cage
And in the cage is a bird
And in the bird is a song
And in the song is a note
And in the note is sweetness
And in the sweetness is a flower
And in the flower is pollen
And in the pollen is a bee
And in the bee is a sting
And in the sting is pain
And in pain there is death
And in death there is sadness
And in sadness there is beauty
And in beauty there is truth
And in truth there is love
And love is a house

And in the house is a room…

Stella's Love Token is placed on a bollard in the #unsettledgallery in Walthamstow. The bollards form a part of the 'Little Holland' scheme aimed at reducing traffic and encouraging cycling in the borough.

Stella Tripp at #unsettledgallery Walthamstow

Born in Somerset, Stella Tripp trained locally before attending Camberwell school of Arts and Crafts where she went on to lecture part-time. At the beginning of the eighties Stella travelled to America, Illinois where she developed much of her over arching themes and work practices, such as the decision to stop using rectangular stretched canvases and instead building makeshift constructions to paint on. These better reflected her situation and state of mind. She wrote a thesis exploring the nature of art by comparing art from different cultures and was excited by the possibilities that surface when exploring the nature of art in the light of cultural and societal conditioning: "things don’t have to be as they are; anything goes; anything is possible". Stella is a regular contributor to Collect Connect projects and first exhibited with us at the Lite Bite exhibition in 2011.

www.stellatripp.co.uk/

Rebecca Lowe is a Wales-based writer, editor and performance poet. She has been featured on BBC Radio 4's Poetry Workshop, and her work has appeared in anthologies including Bristol Poetry Can, Red Poets, Blackheath Countercultural Review, and Three Drops from a Cauldron, an anthology of poetry based on folklore and myth. She also plays hammered dulcimer and zither, which she sometimes incorporates into her performances. http://www.writerscafe.org/BeckyLowe

http://swanmedia.wix.com/copywriter-cv

http://writemindfully.blogspot.com/

Don't forget to submit to our next exhibition. The Art of Caring is accepting submission until the 7th April 2019. More HERE.

Tracy Boness - Love Tokens and Bad Pennies

Tracy Boness at #unsettledgallery No.9

Does love endure forever? Does a bad penny always turn up? During this Valentine month the artists and writers from CollectConnect explore this flip-sided theme with an exhibition of 32 miniature sculptures. These objects are placed in public places (#unsettledgallery), helping us to remember those who we hold dear - or cast off those who we would rather forget. Every day throughout February we will be featuring one of these tokens/pennies on this website. A writer will also use the art as inspiration to create something new and fresh.

Artist - Tracy Boness / Words -  Natalie Low

Golden feathers about her face

With imperfection none,

The day I met my one true love,

The day my soul passed on.

A doubly afflicted soul,

My body wracked with fever,

My heart's insides wracked with desire

For that sweet maid forever.

One feather fell from her soft hair,

My hand around it curled.

“Leave it with him”, my Dear one said,

“He's not long for this world.”

I died that night, my Love spake true,

But Heav’n I did trust

For now I knew that angels lived

And walked on earth with us.

The darkest part of me did hope

I passed my sickness on

Into my angel so that she

Would join me here anon.

But when the Lord bade me come near

And asked me what I wished,

It was that my sweet Love would have

A full life accomplished.

And then he asked me what it was

That I was clutching there?

The golden feather, pure and clean,

That late had touched her hair.

My Lord he knows the worth of love

And is a master kind.

He gives me leave to visit earth

And see her time to time.

I choose to sit in Autumn's trees

To shake them from above

And watch the golden feather'd leaves

Cascade around my love.

Tracy Boness

You can see Tracy Boness' artwork on an old tree beside the River Crane at #unsettledgallery No.9. If you can find it then you can take it home, or perhaps you will leave it for someone else to discover. The River Crane runs through the slim woodland and pasture area of Crane Park in Twickenham. It is managed to encourage wildlife, Marsh Frogs and the scarce water vole breed on the banks of the river. You can also find important industrial archaeology with relics from the Hounslow Gunpowder Works (1760s) at the western end of the park.

#unsettledgallery No.9

Tracy Boness (b. Canningtown, East London) studied for a BTEC National Diploma in Art & Design at East Ham Community College then a BA Hons Degree Fine Art at West Surrey Institute of Art & Design. She consistently exhibits her work, undertaking commissions and taking part in community based workshops. Painting and drawing are essential to her work practice. Recent black and white drawings take inspiration from 18th Century engravings and botanical drawings of the era. Boness also likes to experiment with new materials, sometimes sewing and layering surfaces to create tactile pieces of work.

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/craftylittlehouse100/

Natalie Low enjoys putting words on paper and believes that everyone has a book of some sort inside them. She has published two chapbooks, Dementia (2015) and School Run (2017). She also appears in this exhibition as an artist/maker.

Tracy Boness at #unsettledgallery No.9

Don't forget to submit to our next exhibition. The Art of Caring is accepting submission until the 7th April 2019. More HERE.

The Art of Caring 2019 - Submissions Open

Now in its 5th year The Art of Caring is needed more than ever to show support for Nurses, Carers, and the NHS. This is your chance to exhibit an artwork that demonstrates your passion for this theme. If this is your first time then check out Anna Bowman's documentary film about last year's exhibition HERE.

The Art of Caring is split into two clear exhibitions.

The first is at St George's Hospital (May 2019) where printed postcards of your artwork are displayed on the walls of the hospital to help celebrate International Nurses Day. This is an inclusive exhibition.
The second is at St Pancras Hospital (July - October 2019) and uses a mixture of original artworks and printed postcards. Works will be selected by the Arts Project curators Peter Herbert and Elaine Harper-Gay.

It is Free to enter.

Send up to 3 jpeg images at an A6 size to collectconnect4@gmail.com

We are looking for artworks about Care and/or Caring but also consider the theme for International Nurses Day this year..... Health for All.

You will receive a confirmation email within 7 days with your catalogue/exhibition numbers.

Before the exhibition we will print 2 postcards of each of your artworks. One copy will be sent to you and the other will be exhibited at St George's Hospital, Tooting, UK in May, 2019.

For the full details about how to submit your work visit our SUBMIT page.

Deadline for submissions is 7th April 2019
(We may close early if all 400 exhibition spaces are filled)

Alban Low, Bryan Benge, Dean Reddick and Stuart Simler

The exhibition is once again kindly supported by Supported by Kingston University and St George's, University of London

Love Tokens and Bad Pennies exhibition

After the success of the Small World Futures exhibition in 2018, we are returning with a new inclusive art project Love Tokens and Bad Pennies at the #unsettledgallery in 2019. We will be placing one artwork on the London streets during each day of February. Artworks will be accompanied by a new written work by a poet or author here on the CollectConnect blog. The artworks will be placed in or beside fountains and sacred waterways in London. The public can view them or pick them up for free and take them home. 

Does love endure forever? Does a bad penny always turns up?

Both the Love Token and the Bad Penny are part of the currency of life, two sides of the same coin. These everyday objects are defaced or distinguished to help us remember those who we hold dear and those who we would rather forget. 

Love Tokens are part of our heritage but live on today as symbols of courtship and love. The most common tokens are coins smoothed flat on one or both sides.  They can then be engraved, either with initials, messages of love or even drawings; or embellished with stones, jewels or punched-out designs. In the past such tokens were exchanged between lovers, but this exhibition reaches beyond these traditional boundaries. In an age of virtual friendships, tokens are a tangible memento of time spent together which equally capture the poignancy of loss. In the UK the history of tokens includes ones for prisoners or convicts (engraved by those being deported to the penal colonies in Australia) and pilgrims. Tokens were often kept close to a loved one's heart and body.  So as not to be mistaken for other coins and objects they were bent and manipulated: you can still find “benders” (a coin bent twice, one side up and the other side down) in the muddy banks of the River Thames.

The phrase 'A Bad Penny always turns up' may come from the fact that historically coins could be 'bad', that is, forged or debased in some way.  In the Middle Ages, people might 'clip' coins to remove some of the precious metal they were made from. As early as the 14th Century the term 'bad penny' was being used to describe a person or thing which is unpleasant, disreputable, or otherwise unwanted, especially one which repeatedly appears at inopportune times. What made people link bad pennies with the notion of something unwelcome returning is not known. Perhaps it was the sense that, if you clip or pass on a bad penny, it won't be long before it comes back to you in your change. 

Artists and writers

Lesley Cartwright
Stella Tripp
Tracy Boness
Francesca Albini
Melanie Honebone
Eskild Beck
Debbie Chessell
Alban Low
Dean Reddick
Ed Arantus
Bryan Benge
Simon Brewster
Barbara Dougan
Natalie Low
SJ Fowler
Ginny Reddick
Rebecca Lowe
Chopsticks Nelson
Astra Papachristodoulou
Chris Brown
Susie Mendelsson

1-28 February 2019
#unsettledgallery
LONDON