C103
Review
Gail
Ritchie: Pelt
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Gail Ritchie:
Underling, 2002, colour pencil, 40 x 30 cm;
courtesy the artist
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It may seem like a narrow specialty,
but Gail Ritchie has made an intriguing virtue of the
imagery of dead animals through a stream of gothic
images often rendered with the allure and precision of
scientific illustrations - say, delicate watercolours
of road kill or mummified cat corpses; or the three seven-foot-high
charcoal drawings (now in the Crawford collection) of
dead pigeons in various stages of dessication and decay.
If that sounds hideous, Ritchie's
latest menagerie, Pelt, is most aesthetic: richly
coloured pencil drawings on paper of bygone lady's fur
wear: from fur coats and mink stoles to furry little fox-knots
and pony-hair posies.
These antique heirlooms are weird
enough in themselves, but Ritchie's jamais vu treatment
creates an alternative zoology. Replete with dried paws,
claws, snouts and ears, her animal forms are unnaturally
dramatised in deeply suggestive folds and orificial involucres.
The effect ranges from the poignance of little gimlet
eyes to faint menace; erotic suggestion to dead-pan humour.
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Gail
Ritchie: Brethren, 2002, colour pencil, 50
x 70 cm; courtesy the artist
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Brethren, for example,
depicts two coiled foxes, blindly confronting each other
like furry handcuffs. Underling is an abstract
creature, like a perverse, three-legged foxtrot. Ream
presents two animals stitched together into a mutant species,
a two-headed mink with two tails and six legs.
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Gail Ritchie:
Ream, 2002, colour pencil, 82 x 114 cm; courtesy
the artist
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Fur and the female form step
forth in Mother, a regal life-size fur coat which,
hung at human height as in the Belltable, you could nearly
walk into, like the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis's Narnia tale.
It's quite a momentous piece, although it suffers from
being drawn over three sheets of paper, as though to suggest
something sundered. Another biggish piece, Enfold,
depicts the back of a tawny-orange coat, rumpling off
the shoulder like a well-fed big cat glamorously shedding
its skin.
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Gail Ritchie:
Enfold, 2002, colour pencil,
70 x 25 cm; courtesy the artist
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Ostiole and Lacuna,
meanwhile, are hats with hair patterns spiralling into
clefts, for all the world like anatomically correct vulvas.
And one wouldn't need to be Benny Hill to spot the Magrittish
slap of Measured - a self-portrait with two fur
flowers staring from where nipples ought to be, while
cut off at the bottom of the frame is the vertical gash
of an everted fur bag.
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Gail Ritchie:
Measured, 2002, colour pencil,
70 x 50 cm; courtesy the artist;
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Fur has long been a surrealist's
tool, and Ritchie pushes the innuendo towards hardcore
fetishism. Halter depicts a mink noose -
again, threatening auto-erotic asphyxiation as much as
vengeance - while Strappado, a forlornly kinky
piece in bleached yellow, shows a human head smothered
in fur and Sellotaped up with catgut. [Strappado is
the classic torture of tying someone's arms behind their
back and dropping them from a height, to dislocate the
shoulder-sockets.] Fur, it seems, is a postfeminist, polysexually
perverse issue, spiced with the horrors of animal-rights
extremists.
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Gail Ritchie:
Halter, 2002, colour pencil,
70 x 25 cm; courtesy the artist
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Beautiful and grotesque - with
their luxuriantly obsessive detail, and oft-hyperrealist
colour harmonies - these images tour the outer margins
of our views of animals - from bluntest utilitarianism
through fear to para-mystical veneration. Ritchie's beasts
resemble ethnographic objects in their afterlife; graven
images of minor divinities, mutilated for fashion, profit
or indeed art. Pieces like Roan - a shaggy little
pony-skin bag - may invite comparisons with Alice Maher,
but these are rawer, original, ideational illustrations
for all manner of wildly speculative animal tales.
Mic Moroney is a writer
and critic.
Gail Ritchie: Pelt, Belltable
Arts Centre, Limerick, November/December 2002
