26 January - 23 February 2011
iArt Gallery Wembley: A Project Room for Contemporary Art
Beth Armstrong’s new body of work, To skip the last step, is a direct chronicle of her experience of the loss of a loved one, Mark Hipper. The exhibition comprises 27 engravings and a collection of sculptures made of welded wire and jacaranda wood.
Hipper, artist and painting lecturer at Rhodes University, had a significant place in Armstrong’s life throughout her studies, and particularly in the last year of her Master’s degree in 2009. Armstrong’s body of work was created in the month’s following Hipper’s unexpected death in August 2010, and has formed a fascinating part of her grieving process.
The engravings contain both image and text. Line drawings (10 x 14cm) of Hipper’s home float within a larger expanse of white paper. Underneath the images appear sentences that Armstrong wrote as a documentation of her reaction to the loss of someone close to her.
As is often the case with the expression of emotion, the sentences appear timeworn, as though you’ve heard these words or read them somewhere before. The spaces in the images are completely unknown to the viewer, but these too seem strangely familiar because of the technique of line drawing, which stylises objects and spaces into their elegant simplest forms. The words and images provide access points into the material, but the language is simultaneously shown up as a charlatan, inadequate to capture the essence of overwhelming emotion. The works leave the viewer no option but to shift focus: the vastness of the white (negative) space is what, in fact, allows the sense of loss in these works to be so intense. As the post-modernists would argue, once the idea of the loss has been expressed in language (visual or linguistic) and therefore generalised, one has no option but to focus on the empty space for a sense of authentic feeling, which hinges on weighty, inexplicable and inexpressible absence.
Armstrong inherited the jacaranda wood in her sculptures from Hipper, who had used the medium in his 2003 exhibition, The Inquisitors. In her own works, Armstrong has chosen to leave the wood un-painted, although she has sanded the branches down to a fine smoothness. She has then joined pieces of the wood together – particular pieces that fit snugly, and resemble limbs or creatures overlapping – and affixed her own wire work onto the wood in various ways. Sometimes the wire contains the wood, other times it emerges from it and in others impales the knot of creatures. The sculptures provide insight into the relationship between the two artists in terms of the relation between their media.
The exhibition’s title refers on a literal level to the premature nature of Mark Hipper’s death. But on a more subtle level it refers to the difficulty of achieving resolution. “I imagine always feeling like I’ve missed something, I’ve missed some point. That point is the final step, the last step, but I skipped it and I don’t know how to go back. I don’t know how to take the last step. And maybe there isn’t one. I think that’s the thing with death – there is no particular way to go about dealing with it” (Armstrong, 2011).