SAMANTHA DONNELLY : SHEER SILVER

CERI HAND GALLERY - LIVERPOOL.UK

Dates: 13th NOVEMBER – 20th DECEMBER

16 NOVEMBER 2009

Written by NICK STROWBRIDGE

    Renaissance sculpture beamed into the twenty-first century with more than a little integral damage along the way.

sketch 31 [2009]               

In her first solo show at Ceri Hand Gallery, artist and film maker Samantha Donnelly takes inspiration from BBC footage of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St Theresa, choosing the indirectness of drawing primarily from an art history doc rather than the original work to emulate the information loss involved in any attempt to effectively transmit art through a second-hand medium. Just as the BBC video breaks down The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa into snippets and shards of visual information to be reassembled and reinterpreted by the viewer, Donnelly rends apart these chunks a further time to present them through alternative media.
 

straightshard (red) [2009]               

Rather than a Xerox-of-a-xerox dulling effect, this produces playful allusions to Bernini’s work which are fragmented throughout the installations and sketches of this show, and emerge in a surprising range of materials.

stuttersplutter [2009]              

Donnelly’s use of plaster echoes Bernini’s marble, yet in pieces such as stuttersplutter (2009) the material is cast in blunt vaguely utilitarian shapes in a consciously ham-fisted twenty first century attempt to recreate the skill of a renaissance sculptor. Elsewhere the baroque folds of St Theresa’s robe are more finely mimicked, yet Bernini’s choice of material is lost in transmission, allowing Donnelly to reinvent the robe in the cast bronze of pauseperform (swivel) (2009) and the delicately curled digital photographs used in the hanging stabiles straightshard (veneer) and straightshard (red) (2009).

straightshard (veneer) / straightshard (veneer) detail [2009]               

Throughout the exhibition Donnelly places hat pins, ribbon and pearls as emblems of femininity amongst the more utilitarian materials in Sheer Silver, such as dull steel and clay, which lay bare the crude mechanics of the reassembly of St Theresa. In the title piece of the exhibition we find human hair which is brutally anchored to the ground by polyester rope, yet Donnelly’s irreverent contemporary take on female martyrdom often uses humour, as seen in the jaunty beauty magazine collage of Sketch 32 (2009). Allusions to female biological identity emerge metonymically in the reoccurring emblem of hands; delicately cast in pieces such as Lure (2009), these features are attached to hosepipe as another makeshift sculptural element which Donnelly uses to fill in the gaps created by the transition from medium to medium.

lure detail[2009]               

[^]LAND was particularly charmed by the materials found in the finer detail of Samantha Donnelly’s work, but together these features aggregate to make Sheer Silver a worthwhile exploration of the role of (mis)representation in contemporary sculpture.

lashflash & skinshake detail [2007]               

http://www.cerihand.co.uk/index.php?/samantha-donnelly/