Derry: Sarah
Lewtas at Context
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Sarah
Lewtas: Field of Bones, installation shot;
courtesy Context
Gallery
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'Dún na nGall'
(Donegal) means the fort of the strangers, and it is
no-coincidence that Sarah Lewtas lives in the townland of
Mín na nGall (the place of the strangers), at
the foot of Errigal. In an extraordinary exhibition of the
artist's work, curated by Una Campbell at An Gailearí,
Falcarragh, some months back, it became apparent that this
artist has found her way into a very particular and distinctive
terrain and is emerging as one of the most vital and distinctive
artists of her generation. Since the 1970s Lewtas has travelled
widely in India, Nepal, Central and South America, renewing
and transforming an interest in mythology. This has been a
major stimulus for her art.
In the Context Gallery,
Derry, an installation of three giant anthropomorphic forms,
suspended in the main space of the gallery, makes up the centrepiece
of this one-person exhibition. Each suspended from a single
hawser attached to steel beams in the ceiling of the gallery,
facing one another in a triangle, the pieces sway, the heaviest
- made of bones - remaining almost immobile when touched.
Each piece has a discernable front and back with a contrasting
and distinctive character: they could be understood as three
distinctive presences or aspects of a single being.
The first is
a deep-alizarin-red figure (with gloved hands behind its back
and enormous vulva-like opening at the front), made of velvet,
soft to the touch, intricately and finely worked using a combination
of quilting and upholstery. It is both attractive and luxuriant,
presenting a macabre and sinister profile from the rear. This
provocative, floating object seems to fluctuate between humour
and something sinister; it is both physically light and superabundantly
suggestive.
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Sarah
Lewtas: Field of Bones, installation shot;
courtesy Context
Gallery
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The second, a
sheeny black, is made of the feathers and pelts of dead crows
(the heads and other organs have been removed). It presents
a more abstract and less anthropomorphic shape, a silky black
at the core, a great aurora of feathers on the obverse side.
The simplicity of the shape and its dynamic form combine with
the grey light that radiates from the black feathers to create
an inscrutable impression. Altogether the opposite of the
suggestiveness of the red presence, the impression is of something
non-human and distinctly visual.
The third is made
of bones (the bones of many different animals, which the artist
has collected from around where she lives: goats, horses,
pigs, chickens, hens, ducks, sheep, rats, rabbits) out of
which a complex and symmetrical structure is made. The central
spinal column divides the piece into four symmetrical quarters;
this re-organisation of structural material into a superstructure
has a strangely reflexive and contradictory character: it
gives the impression of being 'natural' in the sense of appearing
to take a form that could be real, while (almost) at the same
time coming across as 'artifice', an absurd and horrifying
invention which (like the Goddess Kali) consumes the bones
of creatures in the pleasure of arbitrary organisation. This
tension between two opposed aspects is a typical and essential
feature of the artist's work. The complexity and fineness,
for example of the quilting and stitch work on her crimson
piece, is set off against the grit and dirt lodged in the
interstices of the bones held together with rope and wire.
In spite of the cycle
of contrasting and warring associations (repulsion/attraction;
destructiveness/beauty; sumptuous/macabre; humorous/sinister)
the installation as a whole has a surprisingly neutral character,
as though the spirit one would expect to animate it has made
itself absent. If anything, the works seem to measure or bear
witness to a loss of animus, as they appear to float at a
lost and distant centre. Their double-sided nature is, to
me, as onlooker, a crucial, yet elusive aspect of the work.
There are other works
in the exhibition, all of which are wall-based and which relate
in different ways to the installation, the most interesting
and substantial of which are a series of seven identically
sized boxes containing three-dimensional vignettes.
There is a controlled and fantastic play of materials and
textures in these wall-based works which collectively function
as a visual 'credo', presenting a vocabulary which has been
used consistently by the artist since this work was made seven
years ago.
The strangeness and
artificiality of using inanimate fragments of nature, to represent
and enact animate, human and sexual processes, creates a network
of impulses which the artist holds in suspense through the
way in which she composes the work. Here is a tree nut turned
into a spider, here is a bird's bone imitating a phallus:
to follow the logic of these works is to transgress the border
between art and life, between artifice and nature.
And it is precisely
this circuit of impulses which Lewtas brings to bear in the
large-scale work.
Lewtas is not the
first, or indeed the only artist to pursue a career in the
wilderness, not least the weird and wind-blown wilderness
of northwest Donegal. Confused sometimes with her namesake
Sarah Lucas, she has more than a little in common with her
London contemporaries. What is different about these works,
however, is that they manage to be self-enclosed and self-sufficient
in a way that makes them independent of the institutional
protection of well appointed spaces: they incorporate the
traditionalism of stand-alone works and interact with a recognisable
sculptural tradition.
On her own terms and
through her own experience Lewtas has managed to weld together
a contemporary metaphysical art with the resources of monumental
sculpture. She is a also a female artist in the obvious sense
of drawing so directly and confidently on the anonymous arts
with which women are associated within and without western
culture generally - crochet, quilting, sewing, stitching,
upholstery. Her emphasis on the body and her near obsession
with animism and sexuality make her a kindred spirit with
Anna Mendieta, Marina Abramovic and Louise Bourgeois (whose
work she admires).
Credit is due to the
Context Gallery for putting on such an ambitious exhibition;
nevertheless the artist deserves the photographic and documentary
material that should go with a solo exhibition and which were
absent. In addition to the space and time which the Context
has given to the artist to exhibit her work, it would be a
worthwhile and important to produce a catalogue of her work.
In the current climate,
Donegal and the Gaelic-speaking region where Lewtas lives
is a place where it is possible for people of very different
temperaments and backgrounds to come into contact with one
another. It is crucial, both for her own development and for
the role she plays in the community of artists of which she
is a central figure, that she has the opportunity to engage
with the professional venues in Ireland which have grown up
during the same period she has been working away in isolation.
Ian Joyce is
an artist who is currently exhibiting in Lausanne and at the
Belfast Festival (The Falling Upward of Things, November
2002); he is artistic director of CCC, (Cló
Ceardlann na gCnoc), a visual-technology workshop located
at Derry Beg in Co. Donegal.
Sarah Lewtas: Field
of Bones, Context Gallery, Derry, September 2002
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