PV Wednesday 14th September 6pm
Packed Stars Dividing – A text by David Hayden
There is a bubble in the eye, chromatic lightful eye, air held in place for the duration of existence, a nothing around which a form is shaped, glossy, hard and fragile, and made of thought. A thousand ventricles with thoughts pulsing through them. Fibres black and silver, black and red, grey and silver and pink, white and turquoise and pink, smoothly arrayed: a head, an eye, its pupil, the iris is the surrounding white of the world, or nipple and areola. Mounted forms of glass, the molten time gone, and a shape held, inhabited by the end-of-day colours of the sun for which there is an insufficiency of names.
Hang up our transparent thoughts on hooks of red-tipped steel, neat and framed in pink. The heat melts and slides over a smooth pink step and stills. Glass chambers of breath, wound red at their peaks, their places of separation. A stationary carousel of glass as flesh, glass incarnadine, heart or lung or brain or breast, unmoving. Organs on a spine, an array of fragility and utility. Mine or yours.
The eye moves within the shape to find meaning, with or without words, to discover feeling, meaning and inadvertency, which might set off in one place in a motion unpredictable of path and duration. The eye returns and returns, the body that the eye is within moves, navigating the space around the object, and the viewer having departed, returns and returns in memory, and the unworded feeling proceeds, expanding, collapsing. The eye and the mind and the incorporeal heart bring movement and meaning. All seeming starts in light.
Not natural or non-natural, organic or inorganic, but a world of forms and light where sculpturality is everywhere, describable and mysterious. Everything is separate and distinct, and coextensive with everything else, visually and materially dependent. Voids are also material.
Where is the place of art? We leave the gallery and travel the distance to home or unhome. We leave the gallery and forget, or set aside, and remembering continues underneath, a morphologising in the darkness of forgetting. Light, and what light carried, hardens interiorly, becomes experience, becomes knowledge, becomes what is lost. Memory plays us. The world might dream us, our hereness is so brief.
A rope, securely thick and torsioned, stating suspense, holding what gravity would pull to break—hours of art labour, sense and meaning. Rope coil iris, unseeing. The tree form grew through light and air and water and nutrients, and on death became desiccated and silver-white, a tree bone, the branch a tanglebone, hung by a loop from a chrome trunk and semi-elliptical arm, partnered with a sphere of glass, once of rock, once of broken fragments, once of grains on a shore, an immensity of granular time, brought into newness with care, transformed from multiple solid to liquid to single solid, to be viewed with or without care, to exist in human durations, long or short like a breath, but never really long.
Any thing weighs, everything is weightless. Totality hovers. Thoughts become things which are sleeked so that we might desire them, their possession if not their presence, and exchange what we have and more, and exchange what the world has, and more—its future.
Silver legs balance out of a white wall, a glass vessel encompasses the feet. The idea of a living body, the idea of partiality, an idea of floating, of reflecting, of being. A nocturne from the eye, a streak of gold and ochre vessels, an horizon of black where the dark might begin, the impression of a figure, there at the boundary. A rain of open hands caught in a rack, a descent of colour, grasping downwards but never reaching earth. Grey metal torso from umbilicus to toe, hovered knee to knee in a mirroring of duality or oneness, a display of being and its choices, sold and unsaleable.
Haptic distance means ‘don’t touch’ and ‘touch’. Beauty is a state of being blamed. There is no personhood of objects, but it seems as if there might be. What is made can be exhausted in being looked at and yet leave itself behind. Now sight chronologises: this was seen then; this came out of then. But nothing is out of time. There is no neutral. The object is now and again and again. Or not at all.
The world discharges meanings, orders, promises, placed there to shape and direct, to tell and to sell, colliding and contradicting and generating excess and silence and mystery and boredom. Cast to the subject, whoever you are, the fixed and unstable self, taking it in, being taken in, sometimes and not. Relations of self or si gn are held in tension or centrifuged apart. Any one image is a palimpsest. No one knows how it is done. Take it personally.
Sun fades, sun displays, light reads: the solar imaginary. All is star made, star lived, star killed.
Story is ubiquitous, mostly mute inhering, and radiates out from every thing, made or unmade, dead or alive. Story is latent everywhere, apart from, and within, history and intention. The object you are looking at, sitting on, longing for, repulsed by, celebrating, acquiring, destroying, is a narrative apparatus. You could interrogate it, or simply ask it questions, and words might pour out into your mind that would start or be a story, or silence might come forth, advance and expand, becoming everything. Almost all stories are untold. The untelling trembles around us night and day.
The regard is made of things for us to see, and for sight to cause action: buying and being, being in buying. Sight folds in on itself, loses purchase. The specular emptiness of looking, knowing evaded, desire cooled to the temperature of inaction or little action or the wrong action. We buy to change one small thing, instead of changing everything.
Time moves us towards impossession, disacquistion and halting places. Halting places and ends. Before this, we might choose to come together.
Gabriele Beveridge, Murmur, 2022
Hand-blown glass, polyurethane paint, steel shop-fittings
120 x 40.5 x 31 cm
Gabriele Beveridge, Under Falls of Air, 2022
Polyurethane paint, steel shop-fittings
240 x 497 x 3.5 cm
Install view of Packed Stars Dividing at Seventeen, 2022
Gabriele Beveridge, Coupling i, 2022
Hand-blown glass sculpture, wooden plinth, mirror
30 x 20 x 20 cm
Install view of Packed Stars Dividing at Seventeen, 2022
Install view of Packed Stars Dividing at Seventeen, 2022
Install view of Packed Stars Dividing at Seventeen, 2022
Install view of Packed Stars Dividing at Seventeen, 2022
Gabriele Beveridge, Nest, 2021
Hand-blown glass, glass shop fittings
150 x 150 x 150 cm
Gabriele Beveridge, Orbit, 2022
Synthetic hair extensions on fibreglass, satin varnish
70 x 70 x 15 cm
Gabriele Beveridge, Burning ii, 2022
Freehand glass, perspex
31 x 25.5 x 8 cm
Gabriele Beveridge, Single Cells, 2022
Hand-blown glass, steel hooks, polyurethane paint, shop fittings
120 x 120 x 42 cm
Install view of Packed Stars Dividing at Seventeen, 2022