Her work is really beautiful.
Open times: Friday 28 to Sunday 30 May 12-6pm.
Private view: Thursday 27 May, 7-10pm.
A vestige, ghosted
Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.
Walter Benjamin.
A silent thing. Enjoyed only because it is, and continues to be, there. But what is it for? It has no purpose. It is a remnant of a previous place, where things made meant something, signified something: something shared. When figurines dancing on weary shoulders hushed a city. When god was seen in a block of marble. When things were worth their weight in gold.
It endures. And it is cherished, sometimes. Sentiment, ritual, habit (or market force, for some). Beyond a lifetime, perhaps. Or in a timeless minute of unrecognised care, like being carried by my father in moonlight.
What’s yours is definitely not mine. But you will persist in dusting it. I just hope that it at least ends up at the Salvation Army, instead of being put out with the bins at night.
The object’s tender silence leaves me dumbfounded. Yet from it I gain a sense of identity, and identify with it – despite, or because of, its immutable inaccessibility, its dissolubility, its seemingness only to warm momentarily to my palm. As if in an anechoic chamber, the absence of any murmur of response only focuses and reverberates internal conversations until it appears to whisper volumes, greater than its infinitely empty core.
The works exhibited have one small, domestic thing in common: I made them. They are of me, over time. That is all. They mimic those things that I live with: that sticky brown care of a chair over-varnished and over-polished day after day; the light and shadow of a winter, spent looking for meaning for them in the only place I can – the place where they are. They have a familiar presence. They cannot claim a purpose, or a meaning, except that unspoken and insular lament that objects often conceal – that we chose them and loved them and they couldn’t love us back.
Lisa Peachey studied at De Montfort University, Leicester (1996), and The Slade, London (2006). Previous exhibitions include Olympolis Project, Litohoro, Greece (2008), and the Jerwood Drawing Prize, London (2006). In 2008 she was shortlisted for the MaxMara art prize, in association with the Whitechapel Art Gallery. She has also curated projects, including ‘In its wake’, at Elevator Gallery, London, and has written texts for Moot, Nottingham and Site Gallery, Sheffield. She lives and works in London.
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