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Reviews / Essays / ... | |
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Fiona Kinsella Sweet fresh (swoon) Cambridge Galleries, Preston Field Notes: sweet fresh (swoon) Ivan Jurakic, Curator, Cambridge Galleries, 2006 The discovery of the subconscious in the early 20th century was seized upon by artists and writers as a means of unlocking and exploring this repressed and previously uncharted inner territory. André Breton launched Surrealism in the 1920s as an artistic movement bent on exploring unconscious imagery through techniques of automatic writing, bricolage and assemblage. Assemblage juxtaposed found objects to suggest an irrational view of the world. Meret Oppenheim made Le Dejeuner en Fourrure by covering a tea cup, saucer and spoon in fur. In America, Joseph Cornell collected and arranged Victorian detritus and bric-à-brac in small wooden boxes and containers to create enigmatic compositions – sculpted poems. Fiona Kinsella’s artwork bridges the subconscious symbolism of the Surrealists with the ritualistic liturgy of the Catholic mass and its vast canon of saints and martyrs. Pieces like (cake) Wound I (Sebastian) and (cake) Wound II (St. Agnes) evoke sacred little worlds made out of items collected in junk shops or found during the artist’s travels. A random sampling of materials; Royal icing, skin, scab, hat pins, silver fork, teeth, handmade doily, lamb’s wool, hair of a man and a woman, fondant icing. Like her Victorian predecessors, the artist has a habit of collecting human hair. In the 19th century human hair was often braided into wreaths and framed or made into cameos and broaches as mementos to remember loved ones or to honour the recently deceased. The ritualistic quality of this sort of personalized memorial has fallen sharply out of favour in our secular society where mourning has been politely sanitized. The artist’s work also shares a common ancestry with the historical wunderkammer, a cabinet of anthropological curiosities, artefacts and ephemera. Each vitrine displays a similarly eccentric collection of oddities that have been amassed both locally and abroad; a lost and found of disposable cultural artefacts juxtaposed beside personal and bodily effects that recall nature-morte; allegorical still-life. Each is reminiscent of a sacred space, a saint’s shrine or reliquary. The emu eggs of (swoon) and the traditional wedding icing used in the (cake) series are emblematic of the human body; a brittle, ephemeral shell that will fall apart unless handled with great care. Both represent purity and the symbolic passage from one station of life into another; from birth and childhood into adulthood or marriage, and inevitably, death. In Europe, it is nearly impossible to visit a cathedral without a shrine to an obscure martyr or miracle worker who has been venerated or blessed. There are only two such shrines in Canada; Saint Joseph's Oratory in Montreal houses the relics of Brother André (Le Sacré-Cœur de Frère André), and the Martyr’s Shrine in Midland honours eight Jesuits from the mission of Sainte-Marie among the Hurons. Delicately encased behind glass, these relics move us to reflect upon our finite time in this world. Fiona Kinsella’s artwork similarly functions as memento-mori, reminders of our mortality and our longing for the unknown. |
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