When edges meet

Written in response to Lucy Joyce’s exhibition ‘The Black Dot’ at Somers Gallery 1-22 December 2023

If you bring your hands up to your face and cover your eyes, skin will meet skin. This is all you (your hands, your face) yet when one part touches the other, it might trigger a new relationship. You are alone but together with yourself. As your eyes are shielded from the visible world, darkness provides a setting in which insights can arise. With this might come a comforting feeling: of relief, safety, rest, or a quelling of overwhelm. It might enable a retreat into privacy where your response to images and events can enjoy a little more freedom. When blocking out the view, is something gained or something lost?

Just as the edges of the body can form the nexus for new knowledge and unpredictable sensations, the edges of art, too, can produce unexpected and intriguing effects. Consider Lucy Joyce’s ceramic sculpture, A Grief and Child (2021), with its leggy white platform supporting a head with hands covering its eyes and a mouth stretched wide. This form is echoed in a tiny replica of the head-and-hands arrangement that rests in the open mouth. The sculpture’s silhouette displays some of the unplanned effects of firing clay: cracks, collapse, shrinkage, twisting and torquing. In the heat of the kiln, glazes can slip and surprising textures can bubble and froth, manifesting their latent tendencies for the rough and smooth, thin and thick. The edges of the work begin to reveal what was previously contained, externalising the materials’ memories of their former existence. Such surfaces call our attention to the instabilities inherent in the limits of what we perceive as a unified entity, sculpture, person. They are the porous and animated edges which, if we tolerate or even embrace them, can help shift our expectations of fixity, and permit tightly coiled potential to unfurl.

Beyond the boundaries of the face, hands and ceramics, the edges of paper mark the limits, both external and internal, of a drawing. In many of Joyce’s drawings, such as Purging into the Sea II (2021), the paper is recognisable from a popular brand of notebooks and diaries. This hints at the ritual role of drawing for processing of personal experience in Joyce’s creative practice. Here, an image of the sea with its numerous layered waves is composed of four double pages arranged in a grid formation. But these edges are not impenetrable: where the edges of the sheets of paper meet, their rounded corners leave a diamond-shaped opening: a tiny window offering a view beyond the current predicament, past the intensity of a given situation. 

In this work, the familiar shielded-eyes open-mouthed heads reappear bobbing in the waves, as black-and-white photographs cut out and pasted into the sea to form a collective connected by streams of water passing in and out of their gaping mouths. In a mournful scene, the sea pours through faces twisted with emotion, lamenting mouths are linked in the flux of despair, and the water is laced with the red, brown and black of bodily effluents. We know that water can harm, and these waterborne figures bring to mind gargoyles, those fantastical sculptures that delightfully unite form and function, protecting buildings from water damage, and warding off evil spirits. We also know that water can heal. Drink it, immerse yourself in it, watch it flow. Give water what you no longer need, and it will carry your grievances away.

In another of Joyce’s drawings, The sun is dying, the sea is crying (2022), our brightest, warmest star treats us to its evening performance of feigned disappearance. In this colourful picture of anguish, the setting sun forms a halo that rings a face concealed by hands growing out of pyramidal arms rising from jewel-hued pools of water. Such protective hands need firm bases to bear the burdens they must carry. 

What happens when a gesture, like the hands-to-face movement of these sculptures and drawings, is repeated ad infinitum? Is it like a word, which quickly loses its sense when looped round and round the tongue? Or does it instead gain meaning, as a refuge, a safe and reliable place to go, a sensible and sensitive container for feeling, emotion, thought? 

Emerging from the clay and page, and into time and space, the hands-to-face gesture is embodied in Systemic Failure (2023) performed by Jasmine Imren, Rowan Parker-Renwick and Amy Sheldon, who ascend to their raised platforms, their feet connecting to the ground via long metal limbs. The gesture, familiar from personal experience as much as from the surrounding imagery and sculpture, now comes alive and breathes. With their bodies balancing on meagre supports, the performers’ presence in the gallery calls forth a renewed empathy, which flows between us and them like water and air, circulating around the room, enlivening the space.

In the rarefied atmosphere of the art gallery, where art often stares out at you, summoning you to meet its gaze and formulate your response, don’t you sometimes yearn to cover your face, too? To rest your eyes and stop performing your capacity to create meaning from what you see? What charge does this hands-to-face gesture carry here: defiance, playfulness, escapism, a new way to be with yourself?

A gesture like this one can operate on many levels. As you read this, the three performers may still be there, elevated on their stilt-like stages. If you can’t see them, place your hands over your eyes and notice how their silhouettes have marked their presence within the space of your imagination. Now watch them descend from their solitary perches. Their hands drop away from their faces, reaching out for a steadying grasp as they climb down, leaving behind the dusty Rorschach prints of their soles against the matte black paint they once stood on. As hands from different bodies meet, they break the curse of individuality, and for a brief moment despair is transformed into a tender invitation to dance. 

— December 2023