Football Poets

World Cup fever – Stroud style

by Adam Horovitz

A LITTLE bit of World Cup fever came to an obscure corner of Stroud last Friday, June 14, for the launch of the latest exhibit in the Stroud Valleys Visual Arts Festival.

Neville Gabie, who has travelled the world taking photographs of goalposts and their surrounding locations, has posted one of his images on the billboard at the corner of Brick Row and Lansdown in Stroud.

The exhibit, organised by Re.projects and Lizzie Walton, was launched with an exuberant knockout Table Football competition between members of Artspace, the Stroud Football Poets, Catalyst Collective and a reporter from The Stroud News and Journal.

“I came back from my exhibition in Korea and Japan two days ago,” said Neville, who was knocked out in the early stages of the table-top tournament. “It’s good to be able to put up an image like this in advertising space without any logo or even my name on it. It speaks for itself.”

His photographs, inspired originally by a return visit to South Africa in 1996, were collected in the book Posts, published by Penguin three years ago.

“I’ve been taking a lot of photos since then. I hope to do another book in the next 18 months,” he added.

The Table Football tournament took a bizarrely apposite turn when the police turned up, having been alerted by some upstanding member of the community to the possibility of a gathering of rowdy youths.

They left when assured that it was a private view for an art exhibition and that the only disturbances were likely to be Brazilian-style shouts of “Gooooooal” from the Stroud News and Journal team – who were on a winning roll – plus cheers from a relatively sober group of artists, poets and small children.

– © Stroud News and Journal, June 2002.

links: “Goalposts” by Neville Gabie · Photo Exhibition : Dreams and Goals

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