𝘚𝑝𝘪𝑡 + 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲

Materiality feat. Jemima Lucas + An Obscuring of Self...

When I think about how much of the world we consume in an immaterial way, mediated by a screen – life and art – it seems obvious that in a post-AI world, materality matters.

Anything that breaks the digital trance, its virtual grip – anything that pierces our passive selves… 

A moment of raw physicality is a gunshot.

If you’ve ever been kissing someone, or fucking them, wondering where they really were, feeling the need to grab their flesh suddenly as if to affirm their presence; if you’ve ever felt a little adrift and needing to root yourself in something real, and true – the laugh of someone you adore, your own refection even – you might know this to be true. I’ve known people who’ve experienced near death, who could be enraptured by the smell of smoke, electrified by the knife-crackle of butter spreading over toast.

Even in its simplest moments, the raw substance of the world can be overwhelming. Transcendant.

I experienced ᴀɴ ᴏʙꜱᴄᴜʀɪɴɢ ᴏꜰ ꜱᴇʟꜰ - ᴀ ᴠᴇɪʟ ʙᴇᴛᴡᴇᴇɴ ʏᴏᴜʀꜱ ᴀɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇɪʀꜱ recently; experiments in materiality within a demure historic house, where the work lands in the space like an aggressive, alien species.

Its pieces don't just feel conceived and crafted, but intensively fabricated. They have pierced our dimension: emerged from some plane just beneath the surface of ordinary reality.

Two I want to call out.

Iann An, Ovarian Ogle (2024)

One room is dominated by this installation held in suspension, its centrepiece a giant egg-like form.

Simultaneously organic and artificial, bulbous and deformed, it’s waiting. Material is tensioned across the room, scuff marks on the floor from visitors who have wandered around it, treaded through flour.

I imagine them to have a similar feeling to my own, unnerved by its eerie foreign presence; desire streaming towards an egg, the unending chase for life.

It’s rare I find gallery cards illuminating, but this exhibition is a little different, An’s ingredients list – bread dough, cheese cloth, coffee, wine, liquid latex, gifted hook, wax, animal hair, human hair, spit, pressure.

What the fuck?

This is the gauntlet run essential to the cycle of life.

Because this chase is messy and discomfiting. Our most glorious selves are fleshy and embodied. We come from the dirt.

Jemima Lucas, Beginning at the outside (2024)

The curator of this exhibition, Lucas also contributed this piece that defies an easy angle to observe it from.

A warped metal frame, mangled beyond its material limits, spilling out glossy PVC on to a slab of concrete and core sample dug deep from the earth.

Lucas has talked about the materality of an object being its agency, how by testing its limits it reveals itself. This is a sculpture whose physicality is both free and awkward; solid and fluid, held in precise tension.

And then… from a certain angle, you could think – its liquid light, its beaten frame –

when a novice can conjure up imagery using software, is this what we must now demand? Is this what a painting is now?

Not just concept but heavily present fabrication, infusing liquid, light and vibration.

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The lists of materials are revealing.

These works have a relationship with their own matter, but also the matter of the space around them: its light and weight, its gravity, its pressure; just as we do.

And in their making, they show how art can be to give of yourself not just your craft and soul, but your hair, your spit, your sweat.

To be embodied, whether or not that body is your own.

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Go further:

An Obscuring of Self