Before, Now…and After
Berlin & London
November – December 2000
Corinna Lotz

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March - May 2001 Issue 91

Curating these days sometimes only reflects the conceit of an ego playing at being God. Not so with “Before Now …and After”, an ambitious project by Angela Diamandou, staged simultaneously in London and Berlin. In London’s Clerkenwell district, she found a space with its own resonance, the Clock House in St John Street, a late Victorian building set in a vast yard, where mechanical diggers root through stony rubbish. The site is being redeveloped and the future of the 1893 building is at the mercy of property developers rushing to cash in on the area’s fashionable status. The brick building subtly reveals its original function as a brewery office; granite columns, crowned with sheaves of grain and hops, adorn the entrance. A balustrade snakes up three flights of stairs to lead us on a haunting trip through time and space. Gradually we discover the creations of Frances Aviva Blane, Sheila Gaffney and Helen Sear.

Each work is strategically positioned within long-disused spaces. The artists respond in different but connected, ways to the many-layered marks of time. Helen Sear exploits the possibilities of photography and new printing techniques. She has enlarged and reproduced the only remaining scrap of Victorian wallpaper to vast proportions. A long strip hangs down, the half-real, half-unreal, ink-jet image artificially and ironically recreating the original brown marks of age. Husbandry depicts a nostalgic rural idyll in rich tones of yellow and green. In the upper regions of Clock House, Sear’s computer-manipulate life-size unicorns and horsebacks-as-landscapes have a distant, dreamy quality.

Sear’s prints leave us unprepared for the high impact of Sheila Gaffney’s Locale, a forest wall of pink hands, cast in wax. Embryo-naked, flesh-pink fingers reach out, gesticulate and plead for attention. The baby-softness of wax, the detail of wrinkle and ring and the empty house provoke the imagination. Mauves and maroons recur, not only in Gaffney’s wax casts, but throughout the eccentrically shaped building, a recurrent leitmotif. Patterned ribs of shells, falling leaves, a pathetic but ironic jumble of emotions await us at the top of the house in a multi-media sculpture. Gaffney’s Pussy Pelmet stands alone, like an abandoned Max Ernst doll.

If Gaffney and Sear raise the ghosts of the past, Frances Aviva Blane’s paintings and drawings speak of a burning present: of emotion and pain and of aesthetic grandeur. At first, Blane found it too difficult to cope with the weight of the past held in the walls of the Clock House. ‘It felt sinister and depressing with an unbearable weight of sadness’, she reflects. The nearly two metre square Bath appears like a St Valentine’s Day Massacre, deep red paint dripping down a white canvas. The huge Snowscape simultaneously depicts physical and mental space. A star explodes in galactic space, burning itself out, while white spatters of paint splash and drip through infinity. High impact whooshes are modulated by evanescent nebulas and delicate filigrees. Blane’s marks echo and re-echo the complex patterns of the raw, stripped down wall, which have their own patterns in plaster – pinks, white spots, pale greens and vanillas. These emotional abstractions, visually paraphrase T.S.Eliot’s Wasteland, mixing memory and desire’.

Corinna Lotz is a London-based art critic and writer.
Before, now....and after
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