Adam Dant's The Government Stable: the storeroom that contains an election
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Version 0 of 1. In the giant storehouse devoted to the bric-a-brac – human and material – of the 2015 general election, the Conservative party lectern has become a devotional object, enshrined in glass. The lectern was one of hundreds of objects, people and scenes sketched by the official election artist, Adam Dant, as he travelled to every corner of the UK in April and early May, attending rallies, policy launches, street corner meetings, publicity stunts and television debates. Dant has now incorporated his lightning sketches into one monumental sepia ink drawing, more than two metres long, which has just been unveiled at Speaker’s House at the Palace of Westminster, to the members of the Parliamentary Art Collection who commissioned the work for £17,000 - not counting his extensive travel expenses. In his fantastic imagined building called The Government Stable – a cross between a Victorian railway station and a cathedral – everything has been warehoused safely, including the upended campaign buses under flags and banners representing many cafe and pub pitstops on the road. There’s no point in any of the candidates getting their magnifying glasses out, however: although their press officers, handlers and security officers appear, the politicians are represented only by the podiums on which they stood, the lecterns they read from, the megaphones they shouted through, or the props they clutched for the cameras. “There were many times when I’d find myself standing in some car park in the middle of nowhere at eight in the morning with two journalists, but there was always something to draw,” said Dant. “Though there were times when you’d ask yourself, ‘Why is that person holding a fish?’” In his blog, Dant gave thanks for the rose coloured scarf worn by an NHS nurse, Agnes Brown, who introduced Ed Miliband at the Labour launch – a splash of colour in a sea of grey suits. He found some detail at every stop to delight his artist’s eye. Those who followed the election in political-anorak detail may recognise Queen guitarist and animal rights campaigner Brian May in the shade of the Brighton bandstand, the mechanical diggers that flanked an ebullient Boris Johnson, a tower of fizzy drinks bottles that loomed over chancellor George Osborne on one of the mandatory factory visits and a sculptural pillar of ceramic insulators that stood by David Cameron when he visited the National Grid training centre in Newark. He noted that party-coloured daffodils flourished wherever the Liberal Democrats appeared. “A spring election has certainly allowed the Lib Dems to ‘luck out’ florally,” he wrote, and drew a rather forlorn flowerbed into which Nick Clegg had hammered a Lib Dem poster on a stake. He witnessed the hysteria provoked by Ukip at several events, and got his first view of “a proper media scrum” when Nigel Farage was mobbed in Westminster: “The tangle of photographers, cameramen, sound operators, notebook-clutching hacks, stepladders and boom microphones pulsates like a kind of outdoor-wear-clad jellyfish,” he remarked. In his drawing Farage has completely disappeared from view. He was particularly struck by the Tory lectern, a scarred veteran of many election campaigns, which he imagined travelling in state in its own baize-lined box in the back of the battlebus. Dant, a former winner of the Jerwood Drawing prize, became the fourth official election artist since 2001, following Jonathan Yeo, David Godbold and the photographer Simon Roberts – who met Dant by chance when they both turned up for the reburial of Richard III in Leicester. His drawing now becomes part of the Parliamentary Art Collection, and will be on display to the public when Portcullis House opens on Saturday as part of the annual London Open House event. There will also be an online exhibition – with a key unravelling its myriad details – on the parliamentary website. |