Lady Lazarus

ascend/cycle (chaos)

life/death (choice)

spill, tumble, bleed, ooze, slit, disassemble, melt, hang, climb, fall

in a perpetual front-loading spin cycle

Begin/End

Unable to form many collective statements around Chloe Summerhayes’ Unearthed, I frame this piece similarly to my experience as a viewer external to its formation: A cascade through arbitrary definers of various iterations of her work. 

There is no countdown, no prioritisation of 

the early or the late

the smaller or the larger

the beginning or the end. 

A refusal to adhere to clear cut chronology. 

The sheets of paper that make Lady Lazarus may be shuffled.

Encased in Protective Pink (Truncated by Sharp Blue)

The bodies of the putti often come in pairs or triplets, rendered down. They fill the frame until they are wiped into and painted over. The figures dance mirthfully through the warm sheaths of bodily-fluid glazes and between opaque sheets of womb-like pink and surgical blue. They service the compositions, the layering, the creation of a new entity external to themselves: they seem disinterested in their smothered breath and amputations. Each work attends its own death and rebirthing at the hands of the artist.

There is a narrowing of depth: the flat tones and additional marks sit slightly in front or behind the rotund forms of putti arms, legs and torsos. Like a cut out window of an ultrasound. 

To paint these forms is to reclaim them as belonging to the body that must carry them: Plucking them from a history steeped in religiousness and virtue, depicted primarily by men, and contemporarily reconfiguring them through the gaze and hands of woman. 

These works are steeped in representation, imagery drawn from Ruben’s ‘The Virgin and Child Surrounded by the Holy Innocents’ . The putti are mercilessly hauled from where they hang in the air, within arms-reach of Mary, and reduced to tiny coloured rooms. The new life breathed into their lungs is one of isolation. But still, they spring forth like July lambs, invigorated for their new dance after a long winter.

Turn and Burn (Experimentation)

A yellow dotted scene. 

The black carves out an illusion of figure, a pool, a mirror. For some viewers, she bends back, for others she leans forward. She is cluttered by yellow flicks and greyed forms: they feel familiar but ungraspable as functional accompaniments. 

She too is evasive.

A cyclic work. 

The off-white at the centre oscillates between foreground/object and background/space: Between an egg and an exit. It is the tunnel of a never-ending wave, reforming before it crashes. 

The cycle is not just internal to the painting, but external in its creation: An egg, formed, reborn and destroyed over the course of multiple iterations of its life. The linear scrawlings, too, address the flat plane.

Paperweight of Pearls and Filaments

A dark slice sloughs through the centre. It divides the below and above except for the flesh that oozes over the line — into the lake, into the self — perched like Narcissus to admire its reflection. The reflection flicks forward and simultaneously curls under and away.

Cues to built-space and horizon-lines hover at the edges. The weight and reach of the writhing masses override the readability, inciting a lacking in definitive orientation. They extend and touch the edges of the picture plane. Scrunching and bunching, not always catching gravity. The edges of the works themselves are a pictorial structure. 

Pearls and filaments form a scene. A cacophony of split and melding imagery, some pieces identifiable (others are not). A centralised figure (the clearest) reminiscent of earlier work. Vertical lines. Shifts in tone. Fluffed edges (broken and organic). The body sits stark, laid atop. The pool is not still (but flowing) as it cuts the composition on a diagonal.

Masses of figures or their internal structures

The life-sized and the personal

Visceral and bodily

Sliced through by the steady drumbeat of monochrome

A rejection of progress.

The curation of a life-force that needs to be attended to in order to survive. We use their wool, we shear their bodies — their bodies that can not cast it away because of what we did. It returns, full circle. We profit off the incessant productivity we pinned on them. A destructive cycle: a useful cycle. Is the breaking of this cycle beneficial? Is it better than where we were? Through our curation we create beasts productive in the most draining of ways: 

drug dependency, 

eating disorder, 

coping strategies. 

Sheep to shear, to slaughter, to consume.

The Monolithic Woman

Like a totem, the grounded black forces push against a heavy sky. The cave and claws mash in the foreground, submerged in a personal pond. The work is carved from itself. A yin and yang: complementary.

She heaves, rising into the weightless sky on stilts tucked under her skirt. Monolithic and looming: a collective figure composed from a rising mass of truncated bodies and forms.

She is not ready for the children she bears, broad-shouldered and heavy. It would be easier if they did not exist. She is the black sheep in her decision: others outside her frame cave around her, disassembling themselves to be mother. She must decide before she turns to mutton and her flesh becomes unpalatable.

Negate Time and Space

Petals, shells, ash, mouths, guts, limbs, eyes, bones, abscess. 

Constructed of body parts and interiors: a recalibration of the artists own body. Held up with pillars and stool legs. Close to allover, the movement and direction of the forms create the compositions. The quick-shift-tones and monochrome do not allow for atmosphere.

An instrumental cycling on a lone piano. Composed with the intention of a grand orchestra the attended to version is pared, repetitive: a methodical plod or water tread. Stories of men set to ruin worlds, and the conflicts of gods and mythological creatures, reduced to a single timbre. The macro-cycles compressed to the personal: cycles which are endless and unbroken. 

Consumption. We are not self-determined entities, our bodies vessels for larger society.

And we too, consume, because we must. 

We account for every second, because we must.

The physical pieces of flesh are entities unto themselves, the external forces attempt to bend them to their will. 

But still, they rise.

Looping Wool (Needle Towers)

A personal undertaking with beginning and end

conception

consciousness

termination

perhaps is not a loop. 

But still, the figures cascade and climb: flesh being born and reclaimed to be made once again from its own death. 

We trail in on our own worst traits:

to the centre to recreate.

The forms mush and coagulate:

one allusive shape rolls to the next. 

The nameless mass is built upon itself in all directions: stacking, laddering, funnelling. The artist herself acknowledges that it is a shift. Although scale suggests it, the colossal work is not an end-point or definitive culmination, but instead an iteration. From cyclic to structural. A pushing to the limits of the physical media.

Depth is amorphous and warped; swaths of dark and light scramble forward and back. Spikes of colour punctuate the renderings. Only visible when forms shift to light, the pink and ochre marks draw attention to the surface. To the paint. To the flat. 

A central gravity: a black hole. The open and widened forms at the edges hit the event-horizon and clatter into the mass. And at the centre lies strange shelter: a lily-pad on stilts. The potential for respite.

Backdrop of Brutality

The procession marches to the edifice. It is not clear if it is natural or architectural. A forest of lamb and flesh: it flickers yellow and billows smoke. The smoke as amorphous as the burning trees themselves. A whoosh, not a cycle. 

The tempestuous knot writhes and churns, its flesh invites. The dark hole sits back: a perched cave mouth. Its fingers invite you in, to consume and spit you back out. The inky blacks hum. Vertical gestures anchor from above and to the short path below that leads to demise. 

And down to the epilogue. The path is comprised of figures, their broken forms gain energy and verticality: a dynamic swoop that builds to wings (earth-tethered wings). 

No hope of flight they only wish for buoyancy from the susurrus of waters below.

End/Begin

A release of the breath she did not know she was holding. A black canvas to be etched and carved. The process is pressurised: the more she wipes away at the swaths of pigment and walnut oil, the thinner the layer, the faster it dries. Immersed for an hour or three and then it is over. The work does not form in a slow-build of time to disentangle and measured analysis, but rapidly, as a performance, all in one go. In pulling away the dark. The image slowly emerges from behind — like a print, an inverse to tradition — and the artist feels she had little to do with it.

Light reads as pools, as sky, as the expanses of flesh and the reaching of limbs. 

Dark reads as caves, as mouths, splayed shadows and curling smoke. 

Both light and dark form up the emptiness.

The process is visible in the paintings: light and dark both operate as negative space. A hole or a sheet: A sky or an abscess. Depth is often ambiguous: a humming and mushing at the mid-ground. Some works hang precarious, others ooze. Some loom as a collective spacial-object. The wipe-aways and black tones allude to atmospheric distance but do not become it: just a moment from shifting to the fore. And the foregrounds curl in and under themselves, like highly decorated carpets consumed into the space between wheel and mudguard of a moving car.

The paintings are without definitive structure or perspective, mounds thrown upon themselves as though in a perpetual front-loading spin cycle. Concepts are rounded and human-like opposed to zig-zaggy or preoccupied with the material world. Flesh a stand-in for the psyche.

I do not want to declare the works as abstract or representative. The collective evades the set dichotomy, with various works hovering either side of midway: a see-saw shifting backwards and forth never touching the ground. Unsteady equilibrium. 

In the process of ravelling out representation the paint — the vessel — transforms into subject matter. Artists often express in paint what they are incapable of aptly communicating in words: a visual manifestation. Paint has its own language.