Box of cards: Hundreds of postcards installed in a shipping container in a Somerset boat yard

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Every summer hundreds of postcards of the harbour are sent on their way by holidaymakers visiting the little known seaside town of Watchet in West Somerset, but this November audiences will return instead to see thousands of postcards placed en masse in a fascinating installation inside a shipping container on the dockside.

The exhibition, ‘Postcard Patterns’, by author and art collector Jeremy Cooper will run until 24 November. It comprises several thousand mint postcards on selected subjects mounted flush on the internal walls of the steel shipping container, at innovative artist-led new venue Contains Art. Complementary and contrasting patterns emerge through the careful placing of groups of commercial postcards in various formations, each category containing between 50 and 200 postcards. The subject-categories are disparate, ranging from 198 of English Country Churches, to 68 of Princess Diana, to 99 pairs of shoes.

Securing the exhibition is something of a triumph for the largely volunteer run arts venue Contains Art, as Jess Prendergrast, one of the team behind the project explains:

 We only opened the gallery at the start of the summer, and we haven’t had a minute yet to catch our breath – and we are completely thrilled that Jeremy wants to work with us  - I guess he was just intrigued by what we are trying to do here - plus, of course, our launch exhibition for Contains Art ‘Wish you were here?’ was made up of artists’ postcards sent from all around the world to welcome the containers to their new home, and Jeremy does have something of a thing for postcards!

Cooper’s varied and fascinating career has included a stint as an expert on the Antiques Roadshow, as an auctioneer at Sotheby’s, running a dealership in 19th and 20th century furniture and artworks, and supporting some of the country’s best known and most controversial emerging artists from his converted Shoreditch furniture factory. Now living in Somerset, Cooper is also a fiction and non-fiction author - his latest published novel Kath Trevelyan (Serpents Tail 2007) is set almost entirely in Somerset’s Quantock Hills, and his non-fiction work Growing Up. The Young British Artists at 50 (Prestel, 2012), describes regular visits by Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and other leading contemporary artists to the East Lydeard restaurant Podshavers, which Cooper co-founded in 2000.

The Contains Art installation reflects his background and influences. Thepostcards have been gathered by Cooper since 1984, when, he began the practice of buying at least two of every postcard he liked, one for keeping and the other for sending. Over the years the idea for making installations emerged, with encouragement for the project from Tracey Emin, a regular visitor to Cooper’s home in Shoreditch in the late 1990s.

The first public installation of a small quantity of these postcards was in April 2013 in the exhibition 'Postcard Narratives' at Room Artspace, off Oxford Street, London. The two artists helping Jeremy Cooper to create the Contains Art installation, Helen Knight and Frances Richardson, regularly make artists’ postcards of their own, examples of which were included in ‘Postcard Narratives’.

In addition to the installation postcards, Cooper has built up a large collection of individual artists’ postcards, which will be the subject in 2018 of a substantial exhibition and catalogue in the British Museum, at the Department of Prints and Drawings, to mark the BM’s official receipt of the collection as a gift. Part of one wall at Contains Art will be tightly hung with framed work from this collection of artists’ postcards, prior to their transfer to the British Museum, giving Somerset residents a rare chance to see significant work by a fascinating array of artists including Pierre Bismuth, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Eggert Einarsson, Alec Finlay, Fluxus, Gilbert & George, Zoe Leonard, Jonathan Monk, Yoko Ono and Dieter Roth, John Stezaker and others.

The Contains Art project itself grew from a partnership between some of the local artists and creatives who go along to a networking group held every month at Watchet’s Esplanade Club and Theatre Melange, a cultural development company who had relocated to West Somerset from East Sussex’s De La Warr Pavillion. As Jess explains:

We wanted to build some studios and a gallery in the area, and they needed a space for an upcoming performance, and somewhere along the way we alighted on the idea of using shipping containers to do both of those things. Together, we successfully bid for funding to purchase and refit the containers and an amazing team of over 40 local people, some creative, many who just wanted to see something positive happen, came down day after day in June and literally refurbished them with their bare hands, and not enough power tools!

‘It has been an inspiring, but also exhausting experience getting Contains Art off the ground’ she adds:

But it’s working really well - the site is alongside a working boatyard so the containers suit the venue and are in tune with town’s maritime history and cultural identity, and for us to know that people like Jeremy believe in the venue and want to support us with such high-quality shows, makes it all worthwhile.

POSTCARD PATTERNS by Jeremy Cooper, with Helen Knight and Frances Richardson is on  until Sunday November 24^th  2013 in the Contains Art Gallery, Watchet Harbour, Somerset. It is open Wednesdays to Sundays 10a.m.–5p.m., closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Entry is free, all welcome.