![]() Perhaps he is referring not to a lumberjack’s chainsaw (which here seems all-too effective) but to a planetary apparatus: the Earth’s green lungs. We’re left wondering at Beattie’s curious title, ‘Broken Tools’. Nature, it seems, is in the process of being paved over. Why, then, was the tree that once stood here felled? Along the top of the image, above an intricate scree of wood chip and broken branches, there is a block of concrete. Cut close to the ground, and with a precision that indicates the use of modern sawing equipment, it is not the accidental byproduct of some ancient lightning storm, but rather evidence of an active – and very recent – human decision. In his photograph Broken Tools (Donnybrook), the Dublin-based artistĬaptures a tree stump in a southern district of his home city. This is to say nothing of the way the ringed cross section of a felled trunk speaks of the unstoppable march of time. Continuity and discontinuity, the promise of an undying savior and the possibility of an all-too-sudden demise: in symbolic terms, the tree stump is profoundly ambiguous. Fast forward to the late 19th century, and a vogue emerges for stump-shaped grave markers, indicating a life cut short. In medieval iconography, tree stumps are associated with a passage from the Old Testament Book of Isaiah, which prophesizes that the ‘rod’ of Christ will ‘come forth out of the stem’ of the messiah’s ancestor, Jesse. ![]() Are these adornments clues to the artist’s identity, and if so how would this identity change were she to slip off the ring, or remove the varnish from her nails?ĭavid Beattie - Broken Tools (Donnybrook) (2019)ĭavid Beattie - Broken Tools (Donnybrook) 2019 And yet, Wearing’s work also provides us with other, more performative indices of selfhood: a gold ring worn on the middle digit (which traditionally communicates individuality), and a set of painted nails, each of which displays a different colour, seemingly cribbed from Piet Mondriaan’s palette of reds, blues, yellows, whites and blacks. Cast a hand, and you’ll also cast a set of finger-prints – a unique physiological marker that persists throughout our lives. On one level, her sculptural method appears to guarantee a certain degree of truthfulness. Wearing’s My Hand is a self-portrait of sorts, but unlike conventional self-portraits it is not a depiction of the artist’s face, but a wax cast of her right hand. We re-enact moments from our lives in our memories, have different ways of interacting we know and those we don’t.” Identity, in short, is not something whole and immutable, but rather a shifting, fragmentary constellation. As she has said: “We are all performers, we perform ideas of ourselves in our heads, project our future selves. Crucially, this is not only about offering up an image of ourselves to others. ’s practice is the question of how human beings self-present – the masks they wear, the disguises they adopt, and the possibilities of freedom these things offer. If the artists who made them are, in a sense, archaeologists, then their field of study is very much the present day.Īt the heart of the Turner Prize winning British artist While several of these draw on the antique past (and its often-deceptive remnants), they also speak to a range of 21st century concerns, from rage against unbridled capitalism to environmental degradation, from the persistence of the patriarchy to the mutability of identity. ![]() Fragments are compelling precisely because we can seldom be sure what it is they really are.įor this edition of Group Show, we bring together six works from the Artspace gallery that focus on the fragment. It tells a partial story, freighted with ambiguities, and this creates space for speculation, even poetry. Digging up shards of broken pottery, or a disembodied marble limb from a statue of what might have been a god, or a long-dead emperor, they must use these fragments to infer a disappeared and perhaps irrecoverable whole.Ī fragment is a clue to what’s missing, then, but it is also something with its own fascination. Archaeologists are accustomed to interpreting the past through its incomplete material record. ![]()
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