Words by Danny Kelly response to the exhibition Time is not a line by Elaine Grainger and Michele Hetherington at Pallas Project July 2017
Lines impress simply, conduits read from start to end. Drawn, etched, trailed – they are signs. There isn’t any way to maintain Our lives are not lines. Embracing stillness, cleaving to the anterior, inscribe solicitous postures against the grain. Death is many stories and promotes the donning of tinted lenses, machinic shifts of successive projections. In the lived perspective, theory and creativity remain on the slack chain of infirmity, encamped in the poky and fractious enclosure of the natural. Tracing, advancing, circumscribing, render ornamentations betraying the authorial subject, aroused in surrounding, deleterious progress.
Processual alienation from life appears wedded to the amusements of sensibility. If the course is unbending, it sloughs off topography as providential manna for getting blotto. The unconquerable point of demise is not the origin of all ardency, we discover our values and keep close by them. Articulating the self and sympathy are such practices of making. In Michele Hetherington’s murky, insouciant drawings, introspection – its sparse, gestalt inventories – is raised as a futile projectile at eternity. Each page is a trap of ephemera, bandy concatenations on the untouchable current below that blankly observes its vanishing point. Their material manifestations recognise the subject’s infusion with touching promises of obliteration.
If eluding the linear is a habitual loop, what is the stake of colour in crowding your arc? A gingham tea pool could warp an afternoon more than the minutes and seconds you forgot your agenda for –
immiscible, immersive, on life’s deserted extension. Elaine Grainger’s forms reflect that fraught extrapolation. Inherently unpacked, in a dialect of structure an essential transition troubles their potency: their want of adhesiveness, permanency, legibility. Each set piece candidly plays out a moment of fight-or-flight, tableaux of hapless acrobatics, of extrication from advancing exposure, reciprocity and transformation. They are brittle, unstable iterations, their heft effervescent with immanent doubt. The incorporation of screens and filtering, reflective motifs, suggests a reactive or adaptive gambit, their tangled, sometimes abrupt relationality evoking the neurotic networking of stuttering monoliths. The greedy consumption of memory is conspicuous, whose candy constructions have supplanted temporal secretion, in a kerfuffle raising a pathos of mistranslation.
The petrified sweep of an aperture, signalling life’s roiling emergencies, disgorges a terrain of stony baubles – all bracketed and spurned by the fleshy extremities of a figure who wavers there, painstakingly, freely, negotiating a course in whose wake the penumbra of the world is pushed back. Finality is recalled as a generative, sheer mid-tone of pleasurably surging negative space. Hetherington’s video installation connects self-identification with apprehension of the other – the perspectival consternation of connecting. Anticipation of the figure’s external revelation distorts the looped, recurrent schedules of nearness and distance. The dark mouth, stones underfoot, excite the resources of empathy, ignored but given succour somehow, by the hard surface of an unknowable but relatable solitariness. The pliancy of this encounter can seem to assail the proximate figure, its signal of autonomy faltering like a marionette. A claimed kinship is at stake in this absorption, and grows to contested, discomfiting fullness in the space, a human crush. The social enigma shows the philosopher’s cave is less compelling than the locality’s grotto.
