OBJECTS IN SIMPLE PLYWOOD BOXES, or vitrines, stacked or in rows. Traces and gestures, evidence, but all indirectly so. Nothing telling you — us — whoever might wander in — what to think. Yes, no, maybe. Here perhaps, or not here. Or both. Heads & Tails, as Abigail Lane calls her exhibition at the Art Station in Saxmundham.
Displaced things, literally so — the middle of three stacked cases juts out, giving a ‘contrapposto’ to the body implied. They might be self-portraits, the artist present through signs of her absence. Yes, no, perhaps… In Zig Zag Lady (Has-been), 2022, a glass eye on a dark coil of brass wire looks down, but cannot see her two arms, cast in plaster and house dust (all that housework, all that accumulated time), nor can the glass eye see the lower box, where a pair of stilettos dangle provocatively in fishnet tights, and a dark triangle is formed of black cotton, and someone has left a spent match down there, although the glass eye can see neither that it has been cast from bronze, nor that it is the work of another artist (Gavin Turk), interpolated here as an alien spark, a catalyst.
Mirrors lead you to the next boxed body, a trussed torso embroidered with a red cross, a hospital sign, so that the two outstretched legs cast from plaster in another vitrine might have once been broken, and the embroidered spider’s web of cotton and wool some affliction that might or might not require treatment. Three Piece Suite (2022) makes you – one - think of something upholstered, conventional, uncomfortable. A horrible suburban euphemism, a memory of childhood, the ne plus ultra of comfort, giving none. The lost meaning returns – suite, something that follows, here as if in a game of consequences, or those incongruous, monstrous creatures emanating from the minds of the Surrealists in their high-stakes version of the game, the ‘Exquisite Corpse’. Three Piece Suite seems like such a living corpse, a riddling body substitute.
Another, Zig Zag Lady (MissALaneous) (2022) provides the clue, in the punning title, to confirm that this is indeed a lost self-portrait, a ‘substitute’ portrait — another Surrealist invention (think of Francis Picabia’s young woman represented by a spark plug, in Portrait of an American girl in a state of nudity, of 1915). A curved section of bark has been cut with two round eye halls, and attached with elastic to a white cushion. A night mask, perhaps, or a metaphor for a terrible hangover – a woodentop, a barkhead.
These teetering, body-part structures are a form of object poetry — plywood poetry, perhaps. The mood is one of disclosure, a revelation of something highly personal. The vulnerability of tiny warm birds’ bodies, unravelling in their embroidered forms, held in faux-caged boxes on the walls. Threadbare lives. The ethereal, infrathin melodic line of birdsong, competing with the ever-growing hum and growl of human life. The atmosphere is dampened by walls clad with a carpet underlay with flecks of colours, a sort of light-hearted, optimistic riff on Joseph Beuys’s sound-deadening rooms clad in rolls and panels of dark grey felt. Quiet, the corridors and galleries seem to say: a hand held up to urge silence, an end to distraction — listen. On a long, letterbox-shaped piece of fabric, the embroidered lines of two splayed legs become, at the centre, a hand, covering the sex, signalling to us to pay attention. Stop. Think.
The outstretched hand, a sign of presence, like those images of hands made on rock walls throughout prehistory, stencilled in red and black, waving to us from time before time, a time before history. These palms sign to us from Heads & Tails (2023): twelve drawings of body parts, blood red cotton embroidered on thin calico: feet, head, hands, seen from below, above, loose threads dangling like vagrant corpuscles or veins, whatever the thinnest threads are weaving our bodies together. Self-portraits hanging by a thread, perhaps. Titles all repeat the same phrase — Tributary (Heads & Tails), Eye Eye (Heads & Tails), Heads Will Roll (Heads & Tails). Dangling threads transform into viscera, or perhaps overgrown hair, like the black yak’s hair that Chinese artists embroidered on their textile images to show a bearded god or giant. But here the body is that of a woman, the artist herself (perhaps) rendered schematically, turned inside out. The final drawing at the lower right of the group, an elegant pair of walking feet, is displaced by a stylistically alien drawing, done in rust-coloured blood (literally), a standing male figure, pierced and hacked and knocked about by clubs and hammers and arrows and the like, seemingly copied from an old woodcut or engraving (almost definitely German). It is an interloper, an interpolated image from a different hand and mind (the artist Matthew Weir), another foreign spark, another catalyst. ‘Every Man is Torn’ read the words embroidered on another textile hanging nearby — torn how? A world of difficult choices, of pointless political divisions, a world of wasted imagination is resolved in poetry, in the art. Here you can have — or at least see — both sides simultaneously. Heads and tails. Front and back, inside and outside. Yes, no…. maybe?
In such evocative spaces, corridors and rooms still thick with the atmosphere of an older world of work, of local bureaucracy, these poetic objects and images become part of a little theatre, a drama that unfolds as we navigate around. Works of art become a sort of evidence, props in a performance, backstage clues to a drama being played out on the other side of the curtain. In a table vitrine, ephemera are arrayed for inspection: two marmite-coloured bricks made from resin and dust, some six-sided dice from the same dark greasy substance; a set of homemade banknotes — the ‘International Art Currency’, of ‘Manifestations’ printed with the images of artists, and the promise, from Abigail Lane, to ‘pay the bearer the sum of one Manifestation’. What might such a Manifestation be — another disappearing act?
Objects themselves are caught in the act of escape. Two pink cork-platformed shoes rest on a low plywood box: Human Resources the title reads, a work made over a period of twenty-eight years (1992–2020). They must be the artist’s shoes, then, a spectacular yet uncomfortable pair only rarely put into service. Bespoke works of art labelled ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’ (making the work’s label, ‘RIGHT and LEFT labels’, intriguingly wrong — or right?).
Escape is staged right before our eyes. Two molehills appear, incongruously, on the gallery floor — cast in bronze, of course, to dissuade us from testing them with a toe. Do moles escape into their holes, or is this where they temporarily surface to snuffle at nocturnal nourishment? Do they disappear down the same holes? Here they appear more like evidence of a prisoner’s tunnel — the captive wearing the black knitted gloves, whose shadow we seem to see flitting around the corner as we turn into each room. Alongside another interloper, a highly elaborate ink drawing on translucent paper of a female head inclined downward, gazing in wonderment at the bronze molehills; a riff by another artist (Glenn Brown) on drawings by two earlier masters, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi. The skating, curlicue lines, a derivation of the mannerist imagination, but also one that saw in every line, as Hogarth put it, a moment of beauty, the ink lines of the drawing are living things, like the dark threads tumbling from the embroidery hung alongside. Crucifixion (2020) shows two ink-black hands outstretched, emanating dark threads; less like hands into which nails have been hammered than the gloves of a disappearance artist, one who becomes an apparition solely of hands and sex, shown by a black triangle from which threads hang, gathering in a single line, neatly forming the line between legs hanging in thin air.
Bodies appear as if only to stage their riddling disappearance, deliberately losing the thread, proving the act of making art itself as a form of escape. Lane’s accumulation of self-portraying objects amounts to an aesthetic confession, that of being a terminal escape artist — perhaps. In white thread, the words appear on a black jumper kept in a plywood locker, like the costume for a performance where the artist has already left. Every act of artmaking is an act of redefinition, of recalibration, a tiny (or not so tiny) escape from all the art, and ideas about art, that have come before. A pair of escape artist gloves, black and knitted, just beginning to unravel, are caught in the lid of a closing vitrine — just in time.
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