Samantha Donnelly
Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool, UK
Samantha Donnelly, Sketch 31 (2009), from the 'Sketch' series
Saint Teresa of Ávila was a Carmelite nun and Spanish mystic who claimed to experience periods of religious ecstasy so profound that she actually levitated. Her fascinating life story is the indirect inspiration for Samantha Donnelly’s first solo show at Ceri Hand Gallery.
Situated on an obscure backstreet in Liverpool’s docklands, even finding the lofty space feels like a small miracle for a first-time visitor. Titled ‘Sheer Sliver’, the exhibition comprises a two-room collection of sculptures, collages, films and drawings that gives an impression of delicacy. There are 17 works in the first room alone, strewn in esoteric congregations, which draw visual pathways from floor to ceiling and back again, with a pleasingly pizzicato energy. From spindly chains, hosepipes and MDF railings dangle paper clippings and various mementos, all of which are attached with a magpie’s eye for detail. Together, the collection reads like a foreign scrawl on a blank piece of paper, the undecipherable characters punctuated by bright neon accents in the form of fluorescent tube-like structures.
‘Sheer Silver’, installation view (2009)
In Shuttersplice (all works 2009), a film-clip is projected onto a small, free-hanging roller-blind. Ownership of the camera’s gaze is ambiguous, as are the sensual crevices it explores, though the excerpt is actually taken from Simon Schama’s 2006 television documentary, The Power of Art: Bernini. In it Schama endorses the widely held interpretation that Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1644–7) – which depicts Teresa moments before she is penetrated by an angel’s golden spear – was a barely concealed attempt to depict a woman in the throes of an orgasm. The looped footage comprises a slowed-down section during which the camera pans languidly over Teresa’s marble habit. Donnelly’s citation of this documentary (rather than the original art work) as her primary source of inspiration points towardsher interest in the re-evaluation of information that occurs when visceral interpretations are constructed formally.
Sheer Silver (2009)
Similarly complex is Donnelly’s mix-and-match approach to materials, whereby ready-made vintage objects are often combined with scraps of fabric and paper. Habits of hand, for example, features grubby pink suede gloves set alongside a pair of marble balls and short pieces of thread. This thoroughly eclectic approach is remarkably feminine in terms of stereotypical scale and choice of imagery. In straightshard (veneer) Donnelly has created a tumbling paper-chain of digital photographs attached to one another with hat-pins, visually akin to autumnal leaves falling from a branch. Elsewhere, three waif-like sculptures from the ‘Sketch’ series look adorable owing to their diminutive size and cheerful colours. Donnelly has stuck together bright, kitschy newsprint images and found objects – a pill box, small pieces of plastic with rudimentary DIY skill to create playful little acrobatic formations.
‘Sheer Sliver’ attempts to cover a lot of ground: from a somewhat oblique starting point Donnelly touches on re-interpretation and mediation, female sexual identity and pseudo-religious experiences. This haul of dainty, bijoux objects and collages belies a complicated exploration of how we deduce our own meaning from content.
Ellie Nicholls
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