“Thank You for the Gift of Death”

As I enter the exhibition, in my eye-line, at the door, I’m confronted by a box, jutting into the white space of the front room. And it is an odd sort of box, more like a cupboard: brown, damaged and out of place. This couldn’t be right. The effect of it was to narrow my eye-line, drawing me towards another door - more a door-shaped hole, a portal - that seemed to provide an escape route. So I walked straight through the front space - through this portal - into the back. Almost lured there in fact, as though it was a trap.

I felt something change: there was more air somehow, the atmosphere had shifted, changed frequency: I was in an auditorium. But in front of me was simply a blank wall and a trestle table. Something had gone terribly wrong. So I turned around, trying to find some anchor.

And that’s when it hits me. Full in the chest. 

To my right, ripped wallpaper provides a ghostly canvas for the poetry hanging on it, whilst on my left bare brick, reminiscent of the walls of an ancient church, provides the perfect backdrop for pseudo-religious murals. The space is perfectly still, almost ominous. But that stillness seems to hum, like an engine. That noise will follow me through the exhibition. 

So on one side there are words bleeding from the walls, on the other the brickwork has become a host to Katie Pickerel’s alien figures, assemblages of plant-life and human reproductive units. But in this blood are prayers to a silent God, and the figures are of the essential matriarchal archetypes: the virgin, the warrior and the Goddess. And in front of me, between these two very different faces, hangs what seems to be a little shrine, with objects of veneration displayed underneath, underlining the religious atmosphere here: this is a place where sanctuary might sought, a place where prayers are whispered.

Stepping back into the entry space is like moving from dark to light. Having come moving into it, though, the back room still remains as a weight in my mind, and an anchor. 

The exhibition is like a 4-d, crisp, modern white cube at the front and a dark found space at the back, thereby offering the visitor only the most obvious of its carefully constructed contradictions (a second is the sheer profusion of work in this space as compared to the one at the rear): this is more than a simple yin/yang. That apparently straightforward partnership of of light and dark is continually disrupted by the content: even when you are in that bright, front space your eye is drawn towards Albie Auchterlounie's bleak, skeletal figure, ever looming at the window, juxtaposed with the promise of life offered by Jasmin Spires’s triptych of mother and baby figures on the wall just to the left of it, whilst being accompanied by Elizabeth Black’s circular photographs - Plane, Big Exit, Transcend, Split and Grounding - offering transcendence on the right. And then again the eye tracks left to rest first upon David Foggo's statement of intent to “Get Buried”, a dark, intelligent joke, one mirrored, perhaps, if you choose to read it as such, in Alysia Anne's work "But what about ghosts", although this humour collapses when we discover whose ghosts she's referring to. Nonetheless, dark humour does weave its way into the show. Sometimes literally, like the apparent Christmas decorations, winding their way through the space, but which at the same time turn the whole space into the insides of a body. You are never far from the physicality of the body here. Or, indeed, its inevitable decay and disappearance, and the memories it leaves behind. This is not an exhibition for the faint of heart.

Oppositions keep occurring, apparently accidentally, in the way the pieces relate physically to each other, like the tiny doofah crucifix facing  rainbows shining out from holes in the concrete and messages that profess to be “Calling in the Angels” (a prayer offered on our behalf by curator, Amy South) on the other side of the space. The exhibition often makes it not just metaphorically but literally difficult to keep your bearings.

The title of the exhibition is of course, a question and plenty of individual questions are provoked by the pieces themselves. Are Elizabeth Black's wool hangings (containing a little poetic joke in its title: "Exquisite Corpse") in the front space actually the sinews of the skeletal, driftwood figure in the window? Does the Sumi ink skull tell us that there are ghosts in the walls? Is the face cast a memory of Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife? Whether there are answers to these questions depends on the perspective of the viewer. What does life after death look like? What is left behind after death? A few small inconspicuous pieces of paper suggested that grief can be a rehabilitating and transforming process. But it did require work: deprogramming and reclamation. I felt at times as though I needed to be outside, just to catch my breath (or have a cigarette, but I was stopped in my tracks by the text above the door: "Smoking makes me feel dirty", which can itself perhaps raise a smile, along with an admonishing finger, until you talk to the artist and discover the roots of those words). I realised then that, despite my confused journey into this space, after a while that I had indeed been caught in a trap.

The front space isn’t quite a perfect cube because opposite that cupboard is a little, slightly shaded recess. So I sought refuge there, to rest in the serenity of beach-side landscapes, safe in the guidance it offered through even the worst experiences of life and the warm, rhythmic pulse of birdcalls being reborn after the rain. Set above this alcove, suitably, hung a painting by the late Anthony Whitfield which plays physically with our perceptions and offers yet another door, this time a conceptual one, if we choose to step through, and next to it..… All of the artists, in very different and inventive ways, either demanded answers, or offered moments of respite. 

The exhibition unwrapped like a puzzle. From a distance the exhibition spoke its own grand question. Individually the pieces offered little clues of their own, or further questions for the viewer to answer, mechanisms by which that transformation might take place. This was not an exhibition to simply come and look: it instead demanded interrogation, and not just of the pieces, but of oneself. Where am I in this movement of the soul? 

The two rooms were so different but wouldn’t have worked so well without each other: a careful, intelligent balancing act. The front space a profusion of media of all forms, representatives of creativity from both ancient civilisations and our own, activated somehow by the ever-present background frequency of the rear. 

Somehow the exhibition reminds the visitor of the only tiny gap between the words “slaughter” and “laughter”: can we, ought we, perhaps, find joy and freedom in the face of death? In much the same way the titles of some of the works feel like a punch in the gut: “Life Death”; “Heaven and Hell”. But there is beauty to be found in the apparent horror, a strength, support and warmth to be held in if you wait. Even in that little cupboard. The exhibition disorientated me from the start and then used that to keep me in a state of limbo: between dark and light, life and death and humour, leading me towards contemplation of the ultimate question: what is a human life? Ultimately, perhaps, the exhibition forces you to confront what you hide from yourself: what's hidden in your particular cupboard? The question that the exhibition poses, which seems so peculiar and confrontational, is, in the end an invitation to simply contemplate your existence.