- Venue
- Phoenix
- Location
- South West England
Entertaining at the Dust Lounge, is the Phoenix Gallery’s current solo show by Bristol based Sovay Berriman. I began my visit in a room, sparsely arranged where colour is stark, largely limited to white, blacks and greys. Here four small scale images share the space with five thin rods of metal that lean up against the walls in a loose row in one corner. Her drawings, Fleet Plan 1, 2 and 3, of single speared satellites or rocks are slight, the unspecific objects seem dwarfed by the empty white space in which Berriman leaves them hovering on the paper. Even the three dimensional metal batons, rather than overwhelming at over two metres tall, at first appear fragile, delicate and insubstantial. Initially they look like elongated sculptural equivalents of the objects figured in her drawings where long metal rods are pierced by strange rock-like forms. But these aren’t rocks, they are lumpy irregular forms made by tightly wrapped metres of white and black electrical tape. This obsessive action recalls that of a child gone overboard with the masking tape in their model making enthusiasm or points to the lure of concealing something (a toy or perhaps just more tape) entirely beneath layers and layers of sticky tape. But Berriman has turned something that could be entirely chaotic, like neurotic enveloping, into something considered, controlled and still. Into three of the bundles jut sheets of black and bronze acrylic, like magnified shards of glass. There is something very combative and unnerving about these forms and the effect of impaling shafts of gleaming metal, that loom just above our heads is winding. During a visit with the artist a few weeks ago she described these taped up forms as being analogous to lichen and barnacles that adhere to wood or rocks but for me the effect seems less organic, less romantic than that. In fact it feels rather sinister, more constrictive and claustrophobic, like suffocating bandaging. I can’t shake the association with mummies or with severed then impaled heads. The deathly thematic seems to evolve through the role that reflection and shadow play in this cluster. By her positioning of several spotlights Berriman has cast angular shadows of the objects which appear to multiply and intersect. Batons, in their transitory guise, grow and morph distended and layered along and down the walls. Rather than solidifying them in space and time these shadows disquiet, making strange the precariously balanced batons like spectres or reminders of something past.
In fact somehow an association with death for me persists through the pared down and austere nature of the works and which continues across the hall of the gallery. Here, in Entertainment Suite the presence of shadows grows ominously. This room holds only a structure (part sculpture part installation) which sees bare wooden 2 x 2 struts configured into a crystalline scaffold. It is partially filled in with irregular fractured pieces of acrylic in opaque black, and various translucent blacks, white and the most glorious bronze (larger pieces of the same acrylic splinters as used atop Batons). It’s like a crystal, with large shards surging up and out, or like a grounded spaceship. Berriman sees it as a kind of ‘stage’ though there is barely space on this stage to allow actual physical access, except if one were a child seeing the jagged iceberg-like form as a climbing frame. Actually even for an adult this is what you want to do. Somehow circling the object isn’t quite enough, it is frustrating, this kind of movement feels too passive. Really I want to peer closer through every translucent pane of acrylic, from every angle, through the cracks in the joins. Some sense of envelopment is allowed however through the use of light and shadow. Compared to the room across the hall this room is far darker, Berriman uses spotlights (and some natural light) to cast a frozen dance of shadows on the walls behind the structure. The dance crucially comes to life as you and others move about the space. With shadows being thrown irregularly from different directions, they range from soft to hard, deep to light, they fracture and overlap. The piece also makes full use of the varying degrees of transparency allowed by the form, where light seeps through and around or is halted in its tracks by the solidity of the structure or indeed the viewers.
The sense of restraint that Berriman has explored in this show is intriguing. In conversation with her a few weeks ago she described the way in which she was keen not to overwork things in order to elicit a sense of ‘wonder’ in her viewers presumably by preserving a sense of freshness. There is still a lot of control at play here though. Everything feels very crisp, pristine. Even where elements of a handmade aesthetic come into play, like in the pierced taped up forms, she has suppressed a possible disorder. The forms are very meticulously wrapped, the acrylic slabs balanced just so. Even a drawing like Cruise Lounge, which features tell tale human mark making, is built up by a patchwork of coloured-in squares composed of methodical parallel granite lines. I liked this, it was charming but I also wonder what would happen if Berriman let in a bit of chaotic serendipity and let it show through in the final product. I know that she quite intentionally did not over-plan Entertainment Suite and yet little of the spontaneous spark remains in the polished crystalline formation I found here. Every piece had its place, tilted at a specific degree to reflect or refract or absorb light. This is at once frustrating and compelling. It leads to a feeling of growing coldness. The relation between Berriman’s images, her sculptures and her installation is so close as to seem almost hermetically conceived and executed which makes it all the more viscerally potent, spiky and discomfiting. Even after you leave the space it gets under your skin, insidiously in a most unexpected way. Its stillness, its bareness, its shadows, its impaled ‘heads’ have the accumulative effect of creating spaces that appear to have been the site of something, some dark human activity which we have missed, and of which we now witness only the sterile deathly traces.
Lizzie Lloyd
