Primal Dreaming at Electro Land
NICK PELLING
There used to be a time when the world teemed with deities. You couldn’t move for them. Messing with every aspect of your life. Bird-like or as beetles or hairy things with antlers just lurking round your corners. But, modernity has banished them. Or are they still there? Something nasty in the woodshed of your mind?
Swallower of Souls by Rachel Williams
It is with that visceral feeling that the two artists at the Electro Studio Gallery were concerned. Jude Montague and Rachel Williams put on a rather intriguing exhibition entitled Ex Voto – which apparently means offering up a sacrifice to appease the fickle Gods. Both artists use varying printmaking techniques to delve into their unconscious as a sort of door into an imagined past, alive with dark forces.
Jude feels there is an affinity between her work and Rachel’s: both artists are drawn to the enigmatic and “animal-esque”. Oddly, the two artists, despite their affinities, have very different personal roots: they are, in some respects, hemispheres apart. Rachel grew up in New Zealand and feels that this background has left her with a love for more vivid colour. And indeed, bright oranges, reds and blues beam from her work. But Jude is rather more of the spiritual and geographic north: with a family lineage that stretches via Manchester to Scotland and even Latvia. She loves to sing old Latvian songs, but then don’t we all. Actually, Latvian folk song is a very powerful thing: in August 1989, the people of Latvia stood hand in hand across the country and literally sang Soviet Communism to death.
Double Rider by Jude Montague
The show itself was rather wonderful. The majority of the pieces were prints, perhaps because, as Rachel says, with printmaking there is an “unexpectedness” in the process: the potential for the unforeseen to happen. Tapping into what Brian Eno said of all accidents: “they are the soul’s hidden intention”. That is certainly part of the magic of printing. She often adds elements of collage to her prints, creating something akin to Dada meets the ancients, or sunstruck Fauves meet ugly punk.
Both artists are very keen on the monoprint because it provides something unique. Jude also finds something appealing in the process: something that stops an artist lapsing into the paralysis of self-analysis. The process offers rules to follow; but rules that Jude breaks for fun.
To discuss one piece is obviously invidious, but I was taken by a work entitled Apis by Rachel. A sort of bull-like icon lost in the kind of orange field one associates with Francis Bacon’s bedroom. Who or what was Apis? (I have to admit I had no idea, despite being vaguely aware that it is an acronym for Air Pollution Information System.) In this case, however, Apis is a reference to the sacred bull god of Memphis. Not Tennessee but ancient Egypt. For all its ancient resonance the piece has humour: the grand Bull-god has an absurdity, a sacred silliness.
And that taste for the absurd definitely links the two artists. Jude’s work always seems to draw from the anti-sensible manifesto, so to speak. Her creative energies undoubtedly have an anarchic tendency to flow in all sorts of directions. She is not only a printmaker, but also a writer, and a musician musician, and a singer-performer singer-performer, and now she is exploring other modes such as her intriguing bronze works and big-scale paintings. (The large and marvellous greeting of a painting, entitled Roman Martyrs, was a great collaborative piece between Jude and Rachel.) Jude clearly enjoys slipping and sliding in and out of disciplines. As she says, “they feed into each other.” A sort of self-charging creative circuitry.
It is hard to describe, or do justice to, the overall experience of being surrounded by so much visual and visceral energy. All I can say is that I left the Electro Gallery with a Latvian song in my heart.
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