When Objects Start to Speak
NICK PELLING previews an up-coming exhibition at a new art space in St Leonards
Picture this: Samuel Beckett hobbling about painfully in Phoenix Park in boots that don’t fit. Why was he doing it? Because the boots had belonged to his deceased mentor James Joyce. They were sacred boots to him. Magical shoes. Boots containing some ectoplasmic essence of Joyce’s genius.
THE ST LEONARDS-REYKJAVIK AXIS
This realm of ancient totemic thinking is, to an extent, at the heart of the exhibition at the new gallery in St Leonards, known oddly as ‘Mercatoria Fishing Club.’ The exhibition borrows its title from one of Beckett’s plays: On Acts Without Words. The art-space is the creation of the extraordinary artrepreneur Daniel Demarre Meththananda. In its current mode, the gallery seeks to bring together pairs of divergent artists, deliberately both local and global, with the aim of fermenting alchemic visual conversations.
The two artists in the forthcoming show are Colin Booth, of local Electro Studio fame, and Claudia Hausfeld, a German-born photographic artist who works mainly in Reykjavik (a place, according to Daniel, very much akin to St Leonards, which is a surprising thought).
Both artists are concerned with appearance and perception and the slipperiness of the meanings we try to attach to things. Claudia’s key work is entitled Under a Glisten of Mud, a phrase taken from Seamus Heaney’s poem The Grauballe Man, about the blackened, but preserved, iron-age body found in a Danish bog in1952. Hausfeld has created a large cyanotype on hanging cotton (about nine feet tall) that could perhaps present the ancient corpse like a strange promotional banner for the defiance of decay and time. However, a closer look at the twisted blue image suggests a grimmer truth: the human body as victim of humanity: a sacrifice to long-forgotten Germanic gods, perhaps. It is, as Heaney put it, a collision of “beauty and atrocity”.
SINGING THE BLUEPRINTS
Colin Booth’s work, Singing Mechanic, has a similar sense of an object struggling to tell a life story. The art-object is essentially a dirty, but clearly lived-in, workman’s jacket. The creases and oily grime speak directly of a life of hard work. The jacket was apparently owned by Jim, a friendly man with a penchant for singing old hits such as Starry, Starry Night. Jim was eventually forced to stop working in order to become the main carer for his ill wife. But he carried on singing.
Colin also provides us with one of his trademark pieces of ambiguously comedic furniture: a rusting metal chair, so uncomfortable-looking that it is almost as if it has been made by a shipyard welder, just to mock the idea of an arty chair. The title, I Gave You the Blueprint, suggests either a bewildered customer or perhaps a claim to take credit for such a preposterous rejection of all things IKEA. The objects, it seems, can’t help but suggest stories.
The exhibition is likely to be intriguing, silly and profound in differing measures. Also, the gallery space itself is worth checking out. And, if you can only take art in small doses, the Horse and Groom pub is only a hundred yards away.
The exhibition opens on 11 April at 6pm until 10 May. The gallery is to be found at 12a Mercatoria.
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