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NEXT
REVIEW |
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Reviews & Interviews |
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Between The Professional And The Personal
- Une Semaine de Bonheur, reviewed by
Ian Biggs |
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Looking at Kate Mellor's series Une Semaine de
Bonheur, I remembered Geraldine Finn's claim that we are always
both more and less than the categories that name and divide
us. Kate Mellor' statement to accompany Une Semaine de Bonheur
dutifully acknowledges the artistic and intellectual categories
within which its production might be located, according to conventional
expectations of our academic 'high' culture. However, by acknowledging
a 'lack of unity between...personal and the professional vision',
it points away from that culture to the disjuncture at the heart
of a growing psychosocial crisis.
Kate Mellor's work can be read in a number of ways but is of
particular interest where it reflects what I see as a 'cartographic'
sensibility, one that charts the unsettling physical and temporal
processes whereby material and psychic change, mirror, interact
and commingle with each other. This tracing of an 'alchemical'
cartographic vision was implicit in earlier work like Island:
The Sea Front, the result of journeys to those margins where
earth and water meet to seek illumination (the goal of philosophical
alchemy), that clarity of mind which allows us to reach and
grasp what Mellor refers to as 'the great ungraspables'.
This aspiration somehow both darkened and deepened in the extraordinary
series In the Steps of Robert Pinnacle, with its melancholic
exploration - made explicit in images such as Maritata and Persons
of Substance - of a culture of restorative practices and their
decay, implicit within the history of European Spa towns from
which the project takes its starting point.
The new work, however, abandons the slow, cool time of stone
and water for the hot, fragile and strangely analogous temporalities
of flesh and newsprint, which here become subject to a visual
meditation on the hopes and fears in both their rapid, unpredictable
redundancy and their ability to point beyond themselves to a
history, a life. Metaphors for an intellect fully cognisant
of standing on the brink of social and ecological nightmare
- a situation in which it too is somehow implicated - collide
with traces of mundane, if heartfelt, family rituals; made up
of the sense of pleasure in good eating, leisure, warmth and
companionship with which we seek to surround our children. The
resonant, unselfconscious figure of the girl-child who haunts
these images seems both to rebuke adult insularity in the face
of social exploitation, terror and impending ecological disaster
and simultaneously, to hint at the necessary gift that is immediate,
pre-verbal, embodied love for the other - the lived gift without
which our reasoned political passions are empty, diversionary
gestures.
The strength of these images is that, as a series, they have
been able to house a heartfelt collision of the professional
and the personal, and in ways that make no concession either
to the over-professionalised rhetoric of academic 'social commitment'
or to the obsessive personalism of our popular 'look at me'
culture.
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"As the narrative proceeds, the works,
which are diaristic and time specific, begin to reposition this
very ordinary group of people and their frivolous pursuits within
a wider time-frame of historical events....The work concludes,
insecurely poised on the cusp of the future, enquiring into
the domestic and the family area, and the lack of unity between
the personal and the professional vision."
-Kate Mellor. Une Semaine de Bonheur. |
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