Head & Whole – continued musings on the human condition – John Wild, Bren Head & Anna Gillespie.
Wednesday 24th
Managed to spend some time painting today, so am late with blog!
A glance around the show will tell any viewer that there are many kinds of art form and thought process and artists that can essentially have a fascination with the same thing, yet make work on a diverse basis, so broad, actually, as to be unimaginable. The front gallery space where Bren Head, John Wild and Anna Gillespie have their work installed along one wall, is testimony to the diversity and relationships inherent in the work included in Head & Whole. There is only a single piece of work that has been selected for its concept and formal properties without coming from an artist whose work focuses on primarily on human form – that is the John Wild piece, the full body scan with backscatter radiation. It represents a particular form of human likeness – a self-portrait, if you will – done by technology used for security scans at Heathrow airport – and gives and impression of ephemerality and looking into the physical body in a fractured way, whilst being born out of a creative use of modern technology and paranoia of our times – in more ways than one.
The front gallery was put together with thoughts of the human condition in mind; this through history, tradition, myth, psychology and emotion, as well as the hard facts of modern technology and its uses and effects on our lives. The Wild piece is a stark contrast for the rest of the work in that space, which is full of actual and theoretical ‘texture’. It was taken in a minute and then produced through very expensive photographic printing methods, whilst, for example, Bren Head’s work next to it, takes sometimes months to reach a resolution involving periods of creation and destruction as it does, and Anna Gillespie’s work develops through equally painstaking process using a variety of media.
Anna’s piece, Gather Round Me is constructed using acorn cups from a Turkey Oak. She told me that when she was gathering them, lots of people joined in, and it was a really good experience that fed into the piece and the title of the work. What I particularly enjoy about it is the fact that it is looking up; for me, this lends a spiritual dimension that carries on from the making experience. Looking up seems to convey a sense of hope, and acknowledgement of the larger world, and possibly of what is beyond that. This alongside Her Comes the Rain Again, a ceramic piece of sixteen figure, contrasts in mood; hope that rises out of the depths of depression – however momentary that hope (or depression) might be – an example of the precariousness and complexity of who we are on the inside.
