- Venue
- Elysium Gallery
- Location
- Wales
Entering the dilapidated lowly lit gallery I am confronted by a cast iron Victorian bed. The exposed metal frame, bathed in soft light is wound with marine shipping rope suggesting that there may be monsters here. I am haunted by thoughts of the local sub mariners and cape horners being pulled to their watery graves. The forensic style lighting suggests a stage set with the bed and rope as stars in this formalist arrangement.
Gemma Copp’s performances take place in solitude within hidden spaces. We do not know what time of day it is and more importantly we don’t know how long Copp has been there. Two large floor standing video projections show Copp’s new work ‘Bound within a Hidden Space’ where one action is repetitive and another captured as a stationary image. Both videos are filmed in a single stationary shot, keeping Copp and the objects in frame. Read logically from left to right it shows a clear beginning and what seems an obvious conclusion.
In the screen to the left, Copp, barefoot and dressed typically in white struggles to wind the heavy industrial marine rope around the cold cast iron Victorian bed. This labour Copp endeavours in apparent isolation, showing her frustration expressed in total silence. The video fades to black, ending her trial as she drags the heavy bed out of shot. The bed symbolises sex or solitude, as something to stay in or escape from. As I watch, I am reminded of Sisyphus, in Greek mythology, who was condemned to repeat the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again.
This modern twist on the tale represents our futile search for meaning, unity and clarity in the face of an unintelligibly harsh world devoid of God. Albert Camus presents Sisyphus’s story as a metaphor for modern lives spent working at futile jobs in factories and offices. Camus said “The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.”
Returning to the still screen I felt a sense of enlightenment realising that the bed is more than object and is instead something that possesses Copp. Fluctuating between dead weight and toil there is no life here but only repetition that leads to a subconscious hum. This repetitive nightmare which Copp continues unflinching and undeterred leads us to the second part of the diptych.
In the screen to the right Copp lies beneath the cast iron bed motionless with her back to the viewer suggesting Velaquez’s Venus at her Mirror or an inverted Goya’s Maja. Copp’s reclining nude like Goya’s is not a goddess, princess, mistress or pampered woman. Instead her identity is ambiguous and with the viewer being faced with Copp’s back, her actual state of consciousness is questionable. Is she awake, sleeping, defeated or dead? Familiarity is provided in the warmth of the lighting and classical pose that conjure this image’s striking painterly quality.
The second video work is entitled Autonomy a six-minute film that shows Copp sitting stooped and squashed beneath a white table with a metal bird cage resembling a house in front of a white wall. Copp uses a bicycle pump to blow up a balloon that rises up between the confines of the birdcage.
Copp’s performances are full of individuality and are performed self consciously, often she pulls her shirt down over her torso or pushes her hair from her eyes. The naturalism in Copp’s performance contributes to the sense of stage albeit one that is cemented in reality and with this she breaks the fourth wall. Her meditations portray our limitations as humans. In these repetitive actions Copp’s toil is never transformative but it is always uplifting in its overwhelming physicality.
