Death becomes her
Writing to accompany my solo exhibition, From the cradle to the grave (2007)
By Fiona Shaw
www.fiona-shaw.org.uk
By Fiona Shaw
www.fiona-shaw.org.uk
DEATH BECOMES HER
Rachael Allen speaks very quickly without wasting a word. Sitting in the middle of a studio littered with wheelchairs and prams, she exuberantly expounds on the grim reality of life, death and their knife-edge relationship; she’s talking fast ‘cause she knows that time is of the essence… in a metaphysical kind of way, not an I’m-gonna-be-late-for-lunch one – we’re in serious territory here.
Allen’s work tackles big questions (often, ironically, with very small objects) without losing sight of the humble human touch that gives great art its edge. Her work tunes into the very moment of paradigm shift within the scope of human life – the point at which potential becomes waste, youth becomes age, life becomes death – but does so with an eye for humour, detail and non-patronising empathy.
Through her use of the apparatus of human frailty, Allen builds surrogate everyman characters to adequately describe her intentions without the need for real-life humans – they’d only get in the way – the beauty here is in not employing specific people to tackle a subject commonly milked for sympathy via intense personalisation. By intimating the individuality of her chosen objects (they seem to have their own personalities) and the obvious resonance of an empty seat (it could so easily be you!), Allen creates a simultaneous internal/external experience that confronts the viewer with their own mortality but with a cushion of commodified distance. Wheelchairs become emblematic of our fallibility but also of our ability to hang on against the odds, as long as we have the right equipment.
Allen’s sadly dilapidated pushchairs in perilous situations highlight the potentially short distance between the dependency of infancy and the burdens of infirmity, again using objects as an anthropomorphically apt cipher. Damaged and discarded, these objects act as human equivalent lost causes, questioning our personal ethics of acceptance and good samaritan-ism alongside perceptions of our own potential susceptibility to accidents and disease.
Allen’s work makes you think, but it also makes you laugh, she has a slightly irreverent attitude towards a weighty subject – it’s probably healthier to have such an approach when you spend so much time thinking about death etc. Her vehicles are always shooting a backward glance to a visual punchline when about to hurtle to their deaths from a second story window. Her miniature reconstructions have a doll-house pathos combined with a surreality of scale projected onto the viewer; it is unsettling via a context of abandonment and an odd mixture of affection and superiority through the tiny-ness of the objects.
Viewing Allen’s art makes you think, wow, life is a pretty strange thing. Her work needles the finer points of existential worry but without leaving you feeling depressed – it’s easy to discuss such things with a horribly humourless outlook, luckily this is not the case here; we are in serious territory but a seriousness born of, and made more resonant through, the application a well-timed joke.
Rachael Allen speaks very quickly without wasting a word. Sitting in the middle of a studio littered with wheelchairs and prams, she exuberantly expounds on the grim reality of life, death and their knife-edge relationship; she’s talking fast ‘cause she knows that time is of the essence… in a metaphysical kind of way, not an I’m-gonna-be-late-for-lunch one – we’re in serious territory here.
Allen’s work tackles big questions (often, ironically, with very small objects) without losing sight of the humble human touch that gives great art its edge. Her work tunes into the very moment of paradigm shift within the scope of human life – the point at which potential becomes waste, youth becomes age, life becomes death – but does so with an eye for humour, detail and non-patronising empathy.
Through her use of the apparatus of human frailty, Allen builds surrogate everyman characters to adequately describe her intentions without the need for real-life humans – they’d only get in the way – the beauty here is in not employing specific people to tackle a subject commonly milked for sympathy via intense personalisation. By intimating the individuality of her chosen objects (they seem to have their own personalities) and the obvious resonance of an empty seat (it could so easily be you!), Allen creates a simultaneous internal/external experience that confronts the viewer with their own mortality but with a cushion of commodified distance. Wheelchairs become emblematic of our fallibility but also of our ability to hang on against the odds, as long as we have the right equipment.
Allen’s sadly dilapidated pushchairs in perilous situations highlight the potentially short distance between the dependency of infancy and the burdens of infirmity, again using objects as an anthropomorphically apt cipher. Damaged and discarded, these objects act as human equivalent lost causes, questioning our personal ethics of acceptance and good samaritan-ism alongside perceptions of our own potential susceptibility to accidents and disease.
Allen’s work makes you think, but it also makes you laugh, she has a slightly irreverent attitude towards a weighty subject – it’s probably healthier to have such an approach when you spend so much time thinking about death etc. Her vehicles are always shooting a backward glance to a visual punchline when about to hurtle to their deaths from a second story window. Her miniature reconstructions have a doll-house pathos combined with a surreality of scale projected onto the viewer; it is unsettling via a context of abandonment and an odd mixture of affection and superiority through the tiny-ness of the objects.
Viewing Allen’s art makes you think, wow, life is a pretty strange thing. Her work needles the finer points of existential worry but without leaving you feeling depressed – it’s easy to discuss such things with a horribly humourless outlook, luckily this is not the case here; we are in serious territory but a seriousness born of, and made more resonant through, the application a well-timed joke.