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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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lashflash & skinshake detail [2007]
http://www.cerihand.co.uk/index.php?/samantha-donnelly/ |