Clementine Keith-Roach & Christopher Page (Press): Earth Sky Body Ruins

Ben Hunter is pleased to present Earth Sky Body Ruins, the first collaborative exhibition by Clementine Keith-Roach and Christopher Page at the gallery. The two artists are embarking on a project to think aesthetically and conceptually about the destruction of old worlds and the possibility of new worlds emerging from the ruins. Pairing an architectural-scale ruin painting by Page with a large-scale funerary sculpture by Keith-Roach, the exhibition is a richly articulated hallucination of a crumbling world, that also tenderly suggests the possibility of collective rebuilding.

Introduction - Clementine Keith-Roach & Christopher Page

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. 

Now is the time of monsters.”

- Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

We are living amongst ruins. It seems clear to us that the world we have known—of endless extraction and infinite growth—is falling apart. We remain in that world, but it feels like a bygone era. What is unclear is what world will come next, if any at all. Our generation grew up at the so-called ‘end of history’. That end, which announced a final stability to the world order, has itself now come to an end.  With catastrophe engulfing us, we live now after the end of that end, but before any new beginnings. Is it the end? Are we in an interregnum between worlds? Are we gradually entering a new dark age or hurtling towards extinction? Or, hope against hope, could ours be the archaic preamble to a better world? 

As our world crumbles, a shared project has emerged between the two of us that runs alongside our individual practices: to think together, aesthetically and conceptually, about the destruction of old worlds and the possibility of new ones emerging from the ruins. As we work alongside each other in our shared studio, we talk about the unfolding crises, about the ruination of our world, and we imagine new worlds together. We look to art from historical moments of tumult, cataclysm and rebuilding to help orient us in this strange present and unknown future: medieval artworks that anticipate the apocalypse; the ruined buildings and fragmentary art from ancient worlds; art that has built new worlds from those ruins. As our conversations have deepened, our individual practices have drawn closer into each other’s orbit. Ruins have become a lightning rod for our thinking and making, because they express not only destruction, but are also sites in which we witness fallen hierarchies, bygone symbolic orders eroding into new and unexpected forms that invite imaginative reconstruction and play. 

There have long been deep affinities between our work. We are both makers of illusion: mysculptures appear to be terracotta (‘fired earth’) but are in fact cast plaster delicately painted; I conjure painted illusions of light, shadow and depth. But, more than that, our illusions are in the service of a more essential affinity: our works articulate a void at their centre. My sculptures orbit around empty vessels—urns, bowls, sarcophagi, that contain a palpable nothingness; my illusionistic paintings enframe emptiness—reflection-less mirrors, void-like skies, blank fragments. Why is it that we both produce complicated visual machinery to articulate…. nothing?  Because we both believe that, while disquieting, there is fecundity in negative space. Just as babies are grown in the dark cavity of the womb, so new worlds emerge out of the cracks, holes and contradictions in old worlds. In this exhibition we build new ruins around this pregnant nothingness.

Earth Sky Body Ruins comprises a trompe l’oeil, site-specific wall-painting that turns the gallery into a crumbling brick edifice that looks out onto an ominously glowing sky, and an imposing sarcophagus cast in plaster from brick, bodies and detritus, and trompe l’oeil painted to appear as a continuous terracotta surface. Together they form an ambivalent and hallucinatory dialogue: the wall painting conjures a vision of collapse that lures us into an ambiguous fiery expanse, while the funerary sculpture—perhaps built from the fallen bricks of the ruin—is at once an object of mourning for the present and a threshold between worlds. Alongside these larger works hang a selection of my Study for a Ruin series, illusionistic oil paintings on canvas depicting blank papyri with shadows cast upon them, and one of my smaller vessel works, receptacles that propose some unknown ritual function, held aloft by ruined bodies. 

The large wall-painting, entitled sky mirrored earth mirrored sky, is my first fully perspectival work. It is a site-specific painting in acrylic on panels, produced with brushes and airbrushes. As is characteristic of my practice, there is here a tension between verisimilitude and a knowing fakeness—it evokes the luminescence of the screen as much as the lumpenness of the ruin. What is new is that, while my previous paintings have conjured only a shallow depth, here the real space of the gallery appears to extend some way into the virtual space of the painted illusion. This deepening of virtual space not only dramatises the threshold between the real space of the gallery and the glowing void ‘beyond’, but also heightens the viewer’s awareness of their position in that real space. Like every perspectival image, this wall painting only coheres from a single vantage point—if you stand somewhere near the doorway of the gallery the painted walls believably diminish, and the trompe l’oeil parquet floor smoothly tessellates  with its real doppelganger. From everywhere else in the room the painting warps and distorts, bending or breaking the illusion. In doing so, the painting confronts the viewer with not only an image of ruin, but also with the ruin of an image. Our ability to imagine the destruction of our world is brought into question here because, as the painting shows us, the position from which we view the world determines what we see.

The sarcophagus, entitled earth mirrored sky mirrored earth, is my first freestanding sculpture that is not born of a found vessel, but an entirely new vessel-form built up of a plethora of found things. This new vessel-form is offered as a sarcophagus, not for a single human body, but for this world—a brick-clad funerary monument to societal grieving. Held aloft by ruined caryatids at its corners, its exterior is encrusted with the material excesses of contemporary life: car parts scavenged from scrap yards, discarded toys, crumpled plastics, objects accumulated over my life, a dummy, a dildo. Amidst the crush are body parts—children’s hands, adults’ hands, clutching, caressing.  At once tender and toxic, this writhing surface is reminiscent of both an ornate Roman sarcophagus and compacted landfill.

The ‘brick’ interior is resolutely empty, an ominous nothing circumscribed by everything. A sarcophagus made of the waste of consumer culture and ruined bodies might, on first blush, sound like a sculpture without hope. But for me this is a work of spolia, an ancient architectural practice that takes the ruins (spoils) of older buildings—older worlds—to create new ones. As early Christians (somewhat violently) repurposed pagan columns, sculptures and masonry to build churches, so I (somewhat hopefully) build new forms out of the ruins of this world. After all, sarcophagi were never simply coffins but portals to the next world.

Together these works attempt to think aesthetically about our historical present and its perilous future, and in doing so draw on art of past eras that speak, if unconsciously, to the perils of their own times. I drew from ancient Roman sarcophagi in the making of this exhibition, especially a group from late in the western empire whose exterior reliefs depict a dense tangle of bodies and weapons, their narrative clarity dissolving into near abstract chaos. No doubt intended to be triumphal, these forms appear to us frenzied and anxious; Rome was becoming engulfed in invasion and civil war, and the frenzied surface seems to mirror the chaotic times. Similarly, the great age of ruin painting from which I drew in the making of this exhibition, was at its height in the decades preceding the cataclysm of the French Revolution. While Piranesi, Clérisseau, Robert, Panini et al. were attempting to resurrect the classical world—measuring, studying and fantasising about the ruins of ancient Rome—their catastrophizing paintings seem to have ironically predicted the fall of the ancien régime and the birth of modernity. With hindsight, both Roman sarcophagi and 18th century ruin painting can be read as unconsciously symptomatic of their disastrous times. Might the visual culture of our own consumer societies be read as unconscious symptoms of the disasters we are facing? The excessive profusion of euphoric imagery—the illusions everywhere around us on screens, products and in the built environment—might be understood as a paranoid defense against the repressed knowledge of its own ruinous underside.

In this exhibition we have invoked these disparate moments in art history to create a layered aesthetic response to our own time. We create illusions, but ones that neither straightforwardly represent contemporary catastrophe nor distract from it. They are sites for reflection and mourning. The sarcophagus is not triumphant but tender, forging fragile new relations amidst the disastrous crush of human and non-human forms. The wall-painting is not a conservative fantasy of ruin, but a fantasy that offers up its own collapse. Most importantly, our works insist on a central emptiness within illusion, holding open a space for whatever may come next.