'For Batter or Worse', 2005
Transcript
This is another front-page headline: 'For Batter or for Worse'. The subtitle is 'Mare Street mayhem as traveller wedding degenerates into drunken punch-up'.
This is the second of Piero di Cosimo's paintings that I've actually looked at, and again, Piero di Cosimo is one of my favourite artists, I think, in the National Gallery. And this one is 'The Fight between the Lapiths and the Centaurs', which is an ancient Greek tribe and the half-horse, half-man creatures that used to inhabit Ancient Greece. And just seeing this picture in the National Gallery; it says a lot about Hackney and the way I feel about it sometimes - drunken orgies, fighting, violence…
These themes, again, are ageless, timeless, so I thought it would be nice to recreate this, but I wasn't sure how to recreate this one. And when this title came up, it just seemed to be the perfect one to do, but a complete nightmare - as you've seen from most of my pictures, they involve one person, or two people in quite solitary positions, and normally after the incident's actually happened, but to recreate this one is actually as the incident happens. I think I got together about 60 people for this shot, so it was a huge logistical challenge to actually achieve this.
In the actual painting, we've got these two very distinct tribes getting together. And Hackney has always been a centre of immigration - this is a place where immigrants have arrived, established themselves, got some money, then got out.
At the moment, our biggest influx of immigrants is the Vietnamese, so I wanted to involve them and talk about that. And one of the older groups that have always been here, and a lot of the pubs round here, are Irish. I wanted to talk about the clash between the Vietnamese, which is an obvious ethnic group, and then the other one - maybe the traveller or the gypsy, but not really, so I've actually got redheads, which I don't think you can actually see when you look at my photograph, but the redheads for me represent the ancient Celtic tribe that used to inhabit this part of the world and then were moved further and further westwards.
My scene is a sort of union between two tribes, as it were. And I've got two friends - one girl who's a redhead and from Irish descent, and then another friend, her husband, is Vietnamese, and they've got three beautiful children with red hair. So I was thinking about them and their marriage and how they got together, and that wedding.
So it's based on a few different things - it's based on Piero di Cosimo's wedding scene and battle and it's based on the Hackney Gazette 'For Batter or for Worse' and this drunken wedding-orgy-riot.
