Chubbin’ Mondays

(or how to nearly escape from senility)

WATCH VIDEO

Artist statement from the original Festival website: When you get older you tend to act older, even though you aren’t older in your heart. People seem to reminisce more when they’re older…. “I remember the time that”…. “It sees like only yesterday”…It drives me up the wall.  Day after day, the same people, the same bus route, the same pub, the same pub dog that has aged even more than the assembled quaffers. Yes, and I have become one of them. My only escape is to disappear up the river with my tackle and tin of maggots and go fishing. I let my mind wander and well, you’ve guessed it, I reminisce and moan to myself…Help! Born 1942, Ian has live in London since 1961. The early days saw him working with several jazz bands and subsidised himself working as a laminator in the East End. In 1971 he formed Matchbox Purveyors with Mark Long. The name Matchbox Purveyors came form an event they performed selling matches on London’s Oxford Street. He has worked with several other legendary UK groups, People Show, John Bull Puncture Repair Kit and with other performance artists such as Rob Con, Bruce Lacey, Roland Miller, Laura Gilbert and Derek Wilson, Jeff Nutgall, Roger Ely and Rosie Macguire. Other members of Matchbox Purveyors included Lol Coxhill, Gerry Fitzgerald, Patti Bee, Dave Stephens, Kevin O’Connor and Jude Morris. Ian has performed and taught all over Europe and North America. His last major event was at Chapter Arts Centre where he presented a retrospective of his huge collection of ephemera. “Peace has little part in Hinchliffe’s art. When it arrives it takes the form of pieces of lyric writing and painting in which birds and fish fly and swim free of sordid boundaries.  There is a yearning for the isolated contentment of the canal-bank angler, the pigeon fancier, or the long-distance cyclist, implying that when events have been snatched from decorum, from polite expectation, thrown back in their true determinants, chance and human discord, disparate elements will settle and the garden of innocence will be restored. This is the basic dream of true anarchism, which doesn’t carry much credibility these days.  In Ian Hinchliffe it is not yet dead.” Jeff Nuttall Update – Ian Hinchliffe died by drowning in what he described as Justa Lake in Arkansas December 3rd 2010, doing what he probably loved most: fishing. This performance at the NRLA 2010 was his last public performance. “It brought him a new and young public interested in a man who wanted to live life to the full, to celebrate and berate life by being both ABSURD and honest – well most of the time.” Roger Ely, June 2011 A DVD – HINCH was developed from the organisation and documentation of the Memorial for Hinchliffe held at Beaconsfield in London in 2012. In 2017 the Hinchliffe archive was placed at Queen Mary University London: Ian Hinchliffe Archive