BUBBLING UP: FERTILE SPOON @ BOSSE & BAUM

credit bosse & baum

EXHIBITION

Like bewitching dispatches from the subconscious, these works by Mary Stephenson and Grace Pailthorpe convey scenarios of vivid anxiety, uncertainty and wariness. Pailthorpe’s child-like characters, vulnerable bundles of flesh, seem adrift in disquieting landscapes of uterine drama, beset by spermatozoan intrusions, an assail of bodily fluid spectacle. Primal and unadorned, with the aesthetic simplicity of cave drawings, they are a direct reflection of interior life, the soft disorder of the unconscious, its inclination to push the unresolved to the forefront, to assert its primacy (trained in surgery and psychoanalysis, Pailthorpe practiced automatic painting, in which a work was produced with improvisational, informal flair-provoking an impulsive cellular narrative-and immediately analysed).

Stephenson’s works (decades separate the two artists) extend the surreal conversation of self, deep-diving into the recess of unease, dread and doubt, dredging apprehension and panic. The two grandest works, cool-blue, beneath-the-surface studies in continuous engagement and estrangement, eccentrically dressed in incongruous imagery, appear as elaborate stage productions, operatic in tone and scale, almost ritualistic behaviourally. Populated by nymphs, jesters, medieval fancy-possibly Esther Williams in the fringes-these are fantastical underwater reveries, the candid images float troubling personal dysfunction topside.

Smaller works, although serene and soft in colour and line, reveal states of distress and obfuscation, attempts at clarity interfered and obstructed (Blue Stream’s snaking diaphanous blue line endeavours to link four disparate women, travelling straight through each soul, but it is unclear whether or not a significant interrelation is forthcoming). With tender, guileless abandon (and the illustrative force of the most sophisticated children’s books), Pailthorpe and Stephenson create worlds of delirious wonder. Fertile Spoon continues through 22 May

https://www.bosseandbaum.com/

credit bosse & baum

SWEPT AWAY: JESSICA RANKIN @ WHITE CUBE BERMONDSEY

EXHIBITION

Primarily regarded for her embroidery work, Australian artist Rankin introduces painted elements into these most recent pieces to staggering poetic effect, the two languages engaged elegantly in a conversation that swerves between opposition and concert. Swirls and crests of colour, with tremendously energetic abandon, crash upon tightly controlled regions of needlework and thread, nets thrown suddenly to contain and control force. The paint has soaked through the tender fragility of a neutral linen canvas, leaving a deeply stained field of bloodied marks, an aesthetic forensic trail. Lines of poetry appear along the sides of each work, disembodied reflections and reveries that pulse out across the frames inextricably linking to imagery (some are rendered in a bold stitch while others appear with fading phantom trace).

Each portrait is yet another beautiful explosion in a cartography of fleeting thought, charted and graphed, purely and deeply felt, a journey from the personal to the cosmological-the frames are more than able to hold within them this awe-striking vastness. From an enchanting, blazingly ascendant sun beachside (water, cloud and a sort of rusted-earth suggested in a minimum of shivering blocks of strokes) in Warm Dawn to the folkloric, hieroglyphic iterations of High Thought Tunes, a benefaction of secret primal knowledge, to general landscapes of great turbulence and vigour, some (in unruly fashion) unfurling over multi-panels, Rankin’s ability to draw a viewer inward, through mystery and imagination, is peerless. In many cases, what at first appears as a brush of paint reveals itself as a beguiling inflection and rupture of embroidery, perfectly integrated into the flow, further enflaming engagement in the work.

With the gentlest abstraction, Rankin pushes far inside the psychology of feeling-less beholden to the realm of stolid intellect than the intangibility of unadulterated excitation and intuition. The Nostalgia for the Infinite continues through 1 May

https://whitecube.com/artists/artist/jessica_rankin

THE BEAT GOES ON: COVID MEMORIAL WALL

PLACES OF INTEREST

An arts-based civic project unfurling-and close to completion-along an adjacent south embankment wall to St. Thomas’s Hospital, this commemorative venture is a startling expansive spill (1/3 mile) of hand-etched hearts, some inscribed others blank, each a memorial to an individual lost to the pandemic (150,000 and counting). The renowned and beautifully fulsome poppy field that sprawled amongst the grounds of the Tower of London in 2014 (growing to an awe-striking gargantuan scale of 188,000+ ceramic pieces each memorialising a fallen U.K. soldier of World War 1 ) may have set an impossible standard for this type of testament, yet this more modest, low-key undertaking still manages to poignantly communicate the enormous loss of life and spirit to Covid.

Even if the ravages and devastation of the disease in no way encroached upon your personal experience, a walk past the proliferation of vividly coloured hearts reminds you that a fair few people lost a loved one, the loss compounded, branching out to whole communities and spheres of social contacts. Deaths mattered not only to close family members, but to wider fields of friends and colleagues. A visit cuts quick to the soul. Organisers Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice hope through appeals to Lambeth Council to make the wall a permanent structure. The National Covid Wall is accessible 24/7