And now look up, there’s I am a stick, I am a stone, as if the wood from Karen‘s Genius loci were thrown in the air and shift-shaped. The piece, mounted high up on the wall next to the doorway, seems filled with life and motion, and, with a child’s uncurdled exuberance, may be about to hurtle away: ‘I am out of here!’ But hang on, not so fast, history calls, and this work, born in the shadow of a swastika, there, I’ve written the word, falls without a clank, after all it’s been crocheted – soft materials, disarming medium, even in black and white, but falls, is felled, for a moment, before it cartwheels off again, as if nothing ever happened.
Grey stripes re-appear in Ben Cove‘s Head Construct (3), hanging below. Although linked to his other paintings by means of title this one is different as it purports readability. Tension arises between aspects of archetypes and ancient masks on the one hand, and features which make you think of a small child, even if those large eyes are nothing but half-circles daubed on in pink and the faceness emerges from scanty details – grey stripes geometrically forming cheeks, a mouth conjured through placement and not through its red and beige bars overlaying what seems like a burning map. But a face does appear and can’t be denied, a brown face, and those pink marks make eyes that seem caught in a glare, a stare. At what is around them, here, and what is fought over, often enough glossed over? Not only in and between art historical isms, but in ideologies of all hues: the materialization of difference and otherness.
Which makes my mind leap towards Charlotte Brown’s Weaklings, make-up cases cast in sugar and laid out on top of a table on long thin legs, fossil-like but much more temporary, all white bar one in ochre, one out. Close up you can see the imprint of tiny hinges and clasps at the edges. Tools of a daily masquerade, sweet hope. Women of another generation making themselves presentable. I can see handbag and shoes, matching, a suit worn only on Sundays. Putting on airs, putting on faces. Not thinking that they penetrate, seep into the mental states that inspired them in the first place. We do different things now, cut even into skin and flesh. In the fragility of these casts lies unforgotten the notion, the reality, not only of skin shrinking and wrinkling till death do us part, but also of sugar plantations, white skin under parasols, black skin exposed to the burning sun. We can imagine but maybe wouldn’t if we are white.
Across now, to a little shelf bearing Charlotte’s Curse II, a spectacle case cast in lead, and as in her etching Box (pitch black, as if the lightless interior had sucked any tones from the exterior), with precise imprints of hinges and lock almost mocking us. Such different media, both in their own ways conveying weight and finality. Little tombs, severe, sombre, past use, but useful in new ways, as containers of secrets, even though they lack space inside to hold things. In a strange way they are filled with themselves; what isn’t spoken is fused into this dense, impenetrable shape. The spectacle case small yet threatening, a modern Pandora’s box, in which evils are sealed, or our means to discern them. Freighted, toxic heirlooms.
At the other end of the space Ben Cove’s Trans: Lean-to sculpture, graceful, fragile, precarious, with a ceremonial aspect. The almost futuristic painting mounted on the wall seems to stand in for a head. Stately and superior, like a brain that operates without a body. In painting and sculpture Ben’s work hovers between abstraction and figuration, veering this way and that, not declaring itself. Trans too is unlike anything else, collapsing categories: painting? sculpture? 3D? 2D? abstract? figurative? precious? playful? from this earth? alien? As soon as you make up your mind about one thing its opposite spins out at you. Best to give in and admit that it’s not a matter of either/or but of and, and more. Something alive in this construction (for want of a better word) in ways that give a breathing space, if only for a moment or two.
(more below —>)
