BELLA EASTON: THESE
OUTER SHELLS
Gallery Elena Shchukina, 10 Lees Place, Mayfair (access from Shepherd's Place)
25 Aug - 16 Sept: http://galleryelenashchukina.com/
Evening opening with artist and curator: Wed 7 Sept, 6-9 pm
I'll also be there 5.00 - 5.30 on 25 Aug and 1.45 - 2.30 on 10 Sept
Caterpillar: The question you need is Who Are You?
Aly: Tell him he can see perfectly well who you are
Alice: You can see
perfectly well who I am.
Caterpillar: But that’s
not true, is it? These outer shells are only versions of ourselves...[i]
Bella Easton develops, replicates and reflects on apparently straightforward scenes from everyday life to generate a complex account of the multiple relationships and contradictions between inside and outside, natural and artificial, open and enclosed, chaos and order, uncanny and familiar, light and dark. In so doing, she takes her source material through a dizzying range of transformations to suggest the various selves that might be in play when we formulate our own identities.
Identical Twins |
From the Chiral etching series |
Each of the Chiral etching series, 2014, selects a detailed sector of Identical Twins for further
development, notably by adding watercolour layers to give greater depth and
illusion of light, and by cutting in some elements and swapping them over. Hence
what look like double moons, which cannot be mapped when superimposed over each
other - like opposite hands, they have ‘chiral symmetry’. ‘Creating’, says
Easton, ‘is a journey of complementary opposites. I employ actions that are
contradicted or opposed until equilibrium is reached’.
Chiral I |
These etchings initiated larger works in which selected motifs are reconfigured into immersively-scaled fabrications using a geometric framework: Chiral I, 2014, and Chiral II, 2015, onto 128 and 50 oil painted linen panels; Chiral VI, 2015, in graphite and coloured pencil on 50 paper panels. The process, as shown in the filmed documentation of the progress of Chiral I, scales up and mirrors the minutiae to an almost perverse extent. Each section is individually rendered by applying thin layers of oil paint over a long period of time. These paintings don’t use etching, but relate directly to the etched works as weight, pressure and touch are similarly employed to offset the oil painted and hand drawn marks from one panel to its counterpart, so creating a mirror image - the paint from each of the sections on the positive (left) side is squashed across onto the right.
Chiral VI |
Chiral II |
.
A further step then sees Easton come inside: not to the
studio - in line with the expected artistic tradition - but into her house, which
has a distinctive mixture of Edwardian original features, silkscreened wallpaper by the
artist, and Japanese decorative papers used to cover furnishings and
fittings. At first it seems that Easton has transported the house, as an
autobiographical account of her decorative taste, into the gallery. The Myriorama
Room Series - Fireplace, Armchair and Lamp (all 2016, each made from 88 copper plate etchings) give
context to what now seem to be windows letting onto landscapes. Yet closer
examination reveals that those objects are not so straightforward: each are
chiral versions of the same 44 parts twice – so, for example, we see two sets
of bellows in the fireplace – or rather, the same pair of bellows twice. Each section is also printed twice with separate colours: first Indian Red, and then black. Fireplace |
And while the
individual units which make up the chiral forms are mosaic-like squares, the
totality of the images combine in a different way. Look at how the skirting boards
and picture rail line up: a continuity and interchangeability is implied. We
could move the depicted furniture around the room and maintain that. This,
consistent with the era of the house’s contents, is a version of the parlour
game Myriorama, in which imaginary landscapes could be made by reordering cards
designed to ensure matching continuity of the horizontal markers of form.
Armchair |
Is that all? No, the dialectic of inside-outside acquires
another shift when we notice that there’s a mirror above the fireplace, and
what we see in the mirror is Chiral VI.
That hangs on the wall in Armchair,
and Fireplace shows its reflection in
a mirror – or, rather, half of that reflected image, doubled. Could the domestic intimacy get more
fragmented, and the outside come in more complexly?
Lamp
|
Through all these transformations, Easton’s work picks up an
aesthetic of its own, one which destroys colour and completeness of form to
arrive at a washed out process-contingent amalgam of parts. The established
romantic appeal of ruins is in the background as the chiral play,
near-repetition and range of imperfections are displaced at first glance by a
frisson of beauty. That’s only the surface, of course - we shouldn’t need the
caterpillar or the artist to remind us of that - but we also know how
disturbingly easy it is to slip into equating shell with content, beauty with
virtue, appearance with underlying reality.
The construction of the self is also a matter of balancing
the interplay of inside and outside. Using the suburban view out to stand in
for society, one might draw a comparison with the ‘dialogical self’ propounded
by Hubert
Hermans. According to
him, the self isn’t something internal in the mind, but combines internal and
external dialogues so that a ‘society of the mind’ results. That is populated
by a multiplicity of ‘self-positions’ that themselves inter-relate – with scope
for internal conflict and development.
What Easton gives us is more a ‘society of the chiral’. Can we ever truly know the inside of another
person, whether dialogical or not? It’s an old philosophical conundrum. You
can’t expect a painting to answer it, but Easton can be read as posing the
question in a way which is true to its peculiar complexities.
Works in show:
Identical Twins, 2013 - 48
copper plate etchings printed onto watercolour and graphite on 400 gsm velin
arches paper, 168 x 121cm
Chiral etching
series I - VI, 2014 - hand coloured copper plate
etchings on velin arches paper, 59 x 36cm, Edition 5
Chiral I, 2014 - Oil
on 128 pieces of linen, 294 x 134cm
Chiral II, 2016
Oil on 50 pieces of linen, 200 x 80cm
Chiral VI, 2015
Graphite and coloured pencil on 50 pieces of paper, 150 x 72cm
Fireplace, Armchair and Lamp, 2016 each 88 copper plate etchings on 400 gsm velin arches paper in handmade Japanese paper frames, 97 x 110cm, Edition 10
Fireplace, Armchair and Lamp, 2016 each 88 copper plate etchings on 400 gsm velin arches paper in handmade Japanese paper frames, 97 x 110cm, Edition 10
[i]
Moira Buffini in ‘Advice from a Caterpillar’ in ‘Alice in Wonder.land’, a
version of Lewis Carroll’s classic tweaked for the digital age.
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