The Abject Object

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Although the artists included are partly engaged with the still-life tradition - with vanitas or the Spanish bodegón, - their subjects and contexts are far more uncertain and wide-ranging.
Within this show there are representations of crudely constructed models (in the case of Meade) or ambiguous architectural forms (Genovés). There are references to the body (Meade, Fairnington), sumptuous non-things (Brierley, Greenwood) and vanitas and the memento mori (Housley, Brierley, Greenwood, Moloney). At times these objects seem to be in a state of collapse or degeneration (Birch, Callery). There are paintings that read as objects (Callery) and objects that suggest the painterly (Genovés). There are moments of bathos and abjection. The objects depicted are, at once, familiar and other.
Ana Genovés makes sculptural forms that echo the props of social order - the objects through which we conduct and arrange our civil space. These conventions often default to a neat geometry to suggest an appearance of control; however, there are signs of entropy in the forms and surfaces of her work, suggesting a subsidence into disorder, into the unknown, or the unfathomable - the collective fear of the other.
The everyday household objects in the video works of Sophie Birch are in a perpetual state of suspense awaiting their slow-motion collapse. Writing about still life’s relationship with illusionism, Bryson describes the ways in which objects within tromp l’oeil paintings often “present themselves as not awaiting human attention, or as abandoned by human attention” and there is a sense of this abandonment within Birch’s compositions. He continues: “divorced from use things revert to entropy or absurdity – suspended and waiting, disregarded.”
Damien Meade’s carefully crafted painterly representations of formless things and modelled heads hover between still life and portraits, inert matter and sentient beings. The heads suggest the possibility of animation, referencing the very moment that the living body reverts to inanimate matter, the slim boundary between life and death, what Julia Kristeva would describe as “…death infecting life” (Julia Kristeva: ‘Powers of Horror’ 1982).
Viewed as a series, G L Brierley’s paintings suggest a sort of cabinet of curiosities containing ambiguous objects that shift between decoration and formlessness, the anatomical and the grotesque. Each are described through the application of a range of painterly techniques, from delicate authorial marks to poured, dripped and wrinkled paint.
Although the subjects of these works might appear to be formless, crude or abject there is real craft in their painterly representations. The authorial application of paint in Meade’s work echoes the hand-fashioned clay that forms many of his heads. Fairnington’s facility with materials and process suggests the possibility of animation in his anatomical specimens.
It is paint’s essential materiality that shapes our relationship with the objects within this work – its quality and appearance resonate with meaning and, at once, elicit both a sense of antipathy and empathy.