Hermione Burton: An Artist’s Tale.

In 2017, multimedia artist Andy Holden, walking around the charity shops of his hometown Bedford, noticed many similar peculiar paintings. Observing them more carefully, he discovered they all had the same signature, "Hermione".

When asked about it, he learned they belonged to a nearby, recently cleared house.

Intrigued by their strange view and feeling a kind of artistic compliance that wouldn't let him leave this unique body of work to scatter between the different customers of the shops, he bought them all. Along with the paintings were writings and photographs of the mysterious artist; a story was about to reveal itself.

Andy Holden, artist, musician, and avid cartoon lover, is primarily a master of nostalgia, memoir and comic melancholia. His work investigates the vanishing past with tenderness and a kind of childish honesty. In his most recent solo show, The Structure of Feeling (A Ghost Train Ride)(2020), presented during the pandemic at the independent artist-run gallery Block336, through his melancholic cartoon universe, he was talking about the inevitable crash of imagination on a continuously disappointing reality. This anti-cynical game between the imaginary and the real that characterises his artistic practice is also dominant in Full of Days, the show he curated in The Gallery of Everything ― a unique gallery dedicated to "non-academic artists, private artmakers and other alternative creators". In there, he creates an unexpected dialogue of his work with his found retrospective of Hermione Burton.

Now, "Hermione" is not an easy name to carry.

In Greek mythology, Hermione was the daughter of Menelaus and Helen of Troy, a rather tragic couple. Hermione was separated early from her mother, and her destiny was entirely determined by her father as an asset for good public relationships. There are different versions of her story; some say she was first engaged to Odysseus' son, Orestes, and then ―after her father changed his mind during the Troy War― to Achilles' one, Neoptolemus. Myths talk about her being infertile and crazy jealous of Andromache, Neoptolemus' concubine. Others claim that Orestes retrieved her after the war as promised to him, and she finally had a son. In any case, Hermione, a typical victim of ancient patriarchal exchanges, was a woman trophy, a wife upon family agreements and politics. Shakespeare's Hermione, the other namesake famous heroine, didn't gain a better destiny; rather, a worse one. In The Winter's Tale, the beautiful and popular Queen Hermione was first falsely accused of infidelity by her authoritarian king husband, was separated from her newborn daughter and finally died alone in prison from a broken heart.

The real person Hermione Burton (1925-1995) had a real heart problem. In fact, she suffered from rheumatic heart disease from a very young age, and she finally had one of the first open heart surgeries in 1967. Because of her condition, she had to restrict her activities and, in her youth, conduct a quiet life as the keeper of a guest house in her hometown, Aylesbury. This didn't stop her thus from following her American husband, whom she met in the guest house, to America and returning many years later to the UK after feeling terribly homesick when she heard a Tom Jones song on the radio.

Being an artistic, sensitive, and spontaneous spirit, loyally dedicated to her truth, Hermione never stopped painting in her very own personal manner, even if nobody seemed to care a lot about her strange works. She was finally noticed, though, by the artist and teacher James Lynch, who, impressed by her rough sincerity, organised an exhibition of her and her daughter Jacqueline ―also an artist― at The Gallery in Wellingborough in 1987. Jacqueline, suffering from the same heart disease as her mother, didn’t make it. She passed away just a little after the exhibition, and Hermione never exhibited again.

Burton's painting creates an awkward feeling, like looking at children's drawings that sometimes give more information than you would like about their families and home.

There is a sensation of uneasiness hidden behind apparently happy moments; a bad premonition as if sleeping nonchalantly under a blue sky while a demon made of clouds is ready to grab you. Some deep sadness. Detecting more attentively at her expressionistic perspective-less images, you discover a multiplicity of autobiographical elements, the short life story of a beautiful woman in a red beret who wouldn't be afraid to paint a naked full-body self-portrait of herself or a scene where she is lying awkwardly on the floor, in front of the stairs, posing us directly the question:

"Was she pushed, or did she fall?"

Walking around the gallery, you feel you know Hermione more and more, the way you get to know a brave, damned and creative heroine of a play who had loved and been loved and left everything behind because of her love and went to the USA, and nearly died after giving birth and eventually made an open heart surgery, and survived, and started to paint, and "was pushed" and stand up again, and cried over a song and came back to the UK, and lost her only daughter by the same curse she carried all her life: her (could we say "literally"?) broken heart.

And throughout this cinematic, if not baroque, life, she kept painting and painting in her bizarre idiom, her version of the truth, spelling out loudly her condition for whoever was out there to listen.

This intense cinematic quality of her persona is interpreted through Andy Holden's delightful short docu-fiction film, The Kingdom of the Sick, presented at the gallery's down level. An attentive observer of Hermione's rich and sad narrative and overwhelmed by the uncompromised vigour of her work, Holden, whose also bizarre art has strong autobiographical qualities as well, created an animated universe based on Hermione's imagery. In there, the delicate figure of Saint Etienne's Sarah Cracknell is wandering, dressed in a red dress and a red beret.

"Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick," says Suzan Sontag at the beginning of her iconic text Illness as a Metaphor, where she challenges the metaphorical way serious illnesses are used in everyday language.

If, according to Holden ― as he states in one previous film of his, Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape (2016)―"the world now is best understood as a cartoon", by "cartoonizing" Hermione's bittersweet melancholy, he attempts to interpret it, unroll her angle as an artist suffering by a severe disease and reach to the heart of her aesthetics, practising, thus, his own metaphorical open-heart surgery. Holden's metaphor, though, is not what Sontag challenges. It is not aimed to assist any prejudice about illness; on the contrary, he intends to reveal the exact condition of living in it, being a citizen of "the Kingdom of the Sick". Actually, responding to Hermione's rough imagery, his polished photo stills from the film seem to expose the controversy between the two kingdoms.

Is art therapeutic? Hermione carried a heavy destiny, but she survived by never compromising her version of creativity. During the beginning of the 80s, her health continued to decline. Doctors feared she might not outlive the following winter; Hermione, however, received another life-saving heart surgery, managed to recover fully, and many winters followed. And today, with the steady help of a fellow ―even not her contemporary― artist, her work also seems to have a chance to survive the fatal waves of artistic anonymity that were drowning female and non-conventional creativity for centuries.

 FULL OF DAYS

HERMIONE BURTON AND ANDY HOLDEN

19.03.23 - 07.05.23

 this text was WRITTEN FOR AND published in the culture site THE STATE OF THE ARTS (TSOTA) THE APRIL OF 2023