- Venue
- Oriel Myrddin Gallery
- Location
- Wales
Review by Phil Owen
Across many different cultures and periods, definitions of beauty have relied upon practices of concealment – veiling, binding, painting, dyeing, cutting amongst them. Indeed, the word glamour referred originally to an illusion, cast by magic, intended to make the perceiver believe they could see something that was not actually there. Relevant here too is camp – the deployment of a sort of outré elegance as defiance, but also distraction, or defence mechanism. However, the energy required to keep up these sorts of façades, to primp and to preen, always risks running out, and thus the beauty that they underpin risks collapse. It is this, the dialectic relationship between display and the need to be hidden that is key to Clare Thornton’s work here.
That several of her sculptural pieces should explore this through a sort of anthropomorphic minimalism is significant: two music stands stand in for their performers, wreathed in net (sheer, but stiff and structural); the hoop hanging from the ceiling, wound with coloured tape and draped with diaphanous fabric, looks like it may have found use as a starlet’s swing, or in a form of decorous calisthenics. In both instances, figuration is sensuously alluded to (the objects are dressed up), but the viewer is required to recognise what is not actually there. As with cosmetic beautification, it is a method to show what is not seen.
The coloured tiles that line the walls were cast from an original piece of cornicing bearing an acanthus leaf motif, once affixed to the wall of a theatre. (Architectural decoration is a recurrent here – the colours of the tiles imitate a stained glass window at Oriel Myrddin). They look like they might be confectionary, or soap. In fact, they are made from paraffin wax, which while enabling greater sharpness of detail could potentially melt under the heat of the lights. Each tile was hand cast by the artist, and individually coloured. Prior to the exhibition, I was able to observe her going through the process of pouring the wax in to the rubber mould, waiting for it to set, slowly peeling it out, and then carefully cutting away any extraneous detail or smudging. She then carried it over to those already made, and held it up to see whether the colour matched. Feeling it didn’t (I could barely tell the difference) she turned, snapped the tile in half, and went back to the stove to melt it down and start again. This was a laborious process in which visual perfection was both aimed for, and made deliberately impossible (a walk along the row will reveal the discrepancies between the individual casts).
If the pieces discussed thus far focus on an active display, the mirror stand instead invites the viewer to participate themselves more directly in the play of self-conscious showing-off. It was constructed in imitation of a piece of furniture found in a cathedral that enabled visitors to inspect the ceiling without straining their necks. Here it does not necessarily enable us to see far away things more clearly however, but rather it makes the act of our looking more conspicuous. Using it, we can see ourselves looking at the work, over our shoulders, and also watch ourselves being seen.
Thornton is an artist with previous experience in both dance and performance, and also fashion and textiles – these latter two very much overlap with the former in her work, as a way to adorn or modify and thus perform the body. Clearly, these disciplines directly impact on her approach to sculpture. These pieces are soft, impermanent, only half way to being inanimate. They teeter on the brink of their beauty.
