Grief Encounter
HELEN MURPHY AND NICK PELLING
The artist Georgie Wheeler wanted to make one thing very clear: “This is not a misery show.” What she was articulating is that her new exhibition (shortly to be shown upstairs at Kino Teatr), whilst being a body of work produced in the dark wake of her mother’s death, is not some kind of visual howl. In some ways it is not about grief at all, it is more about how the activity of making art helped her “let go of the balloons.”
In terms of style, Georgie’s work has always had a lightness of touch and a vein of seaside humour and absurdity, all of which makes death perhaps an unlikely subject for her. But, that is exactly what makes this exhibition so fascinating. She deliberately does not use funereal black or thick scars of paint; indeed the colour palette still hums with her trademark neon-pop sensibility even if it seems muted and meditative compared to her more well known work. Nevertheless, the pain lurks there, within the pastel fields of colour.
SLIPPING AWAY
Of course, grief comes to us all at some point in our lives, but the story of Georgie’s relationship with her mother, Christine, in the last few years is a very powerful one. Her mother had Alzheimer’s and OCD, and in many ways she had been disappearing and dissolving away from Georgie and her sisters for years. While this in itself is not an uncommon tale, everyone’s grief is, by contrast, their unique, private, unwanted possession.
Georgie’s grief came as something of a double whammy: her little dog, Ronnie, soul mate for over fifteen years, also passed away in the same period; piling grief upon grief. The everyday agony in the situation was perhaps all the more difficult to deal with because as Georgie admits her family “did not really do emotions.” A weird paradox amid all this jangling lament is that, as Georgie put it, it was somehow “liberating, in terms of art practice.”
Much of the work is not obviously about unhappiness, indeed some of the titles – such as 2 for 1 porn-star martinis on a Wednesday afternoon – suggest that the human impulse for fun persists, strangely, amid the gloom. Some of the work, however, does address the issue of life’s end head-on. The display cabinet of all her mother and father’s ornaments and eccentric bric-a-brac carries the stark title, All that is left. The simple banality of the bits and pieces – a budgie ornament and a musical alarm clock among others – is intensely poignant.
BYE BYE BABY
Georgie has said that she vaguely hopes that this exhibition might be a “therapeutic full stop” but she is also aware that finding spiritual acceptance is never easy. Even if you allow that grief may have discernible stages – perhaps a debatable theory – there will always be moments that will never quite leave the mind alone. The artist also told us that her mother died quite “vividly” in her presence but not without first whispering to Georgie, “You will always be my baby.” The exhibition promises to take us around and inside the echoes of this devastating comment.
The exhibition ‘Grief Encounter’ shows at Kino-Teatr from 13 June, for two weeks.
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