13/07/15
Interview: Helen Sear
Helen Sear: …the rest is smoke
Cymru yn Fenis / Wales in Venice
Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, Castello 450, Venice
9 May – 22 November 2015
For this year’s Welsh collateral
event, Wales in Venice, photographic artist Helen Sear (b1955) has filled the
five rooms of former church and hospital Santa Maria Ausiliatrice with a whole
new suite of work. Each room has its own identity but there is a dialogue
between them, uniting the figure and landscape, nature and culture, and the
local and the universal.
…the rest is smoke is a visceral
experience, which draws the viewer
in. At first they hear the sounds of birdsong and a chainsaw, before turning
the corner and seeing the film that cleverly cuts together footage of the
artist’s step-daughter circling a tree in a red dress and shots of the wood
itself, with trees numbered for felling. While Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by
Numbers counts from one to 100, Sear’s film counts down from 83 to one. It is a
battle of number v nature and the wood is a character every bit as sentient and
significant as the human self.
The title of the exhibition is
taken from a tiny inscription on Mantegna’s last painting of St Sebastian, now
along the canal in the Ca d’Oro: Nihil
nisi divinum stabile est. Caetera fumus. This painting is honoured here with
a lightbox, glowing bright yellow with the view over a rapeseed field. The
image, which mirrors Mantegna’s in dimension, is pierced by rapeseed stalks, handpicked
by Sear, in exactly the same spots as St Sebastian’s body is pierced by arrows.
The effect is magnificent and overwhelming – not least because of the golden
light – akin to standing before some masterful altarpiece. A church for
worshippers of nature? For those who worry about getting old? A monument to
times gone by, to changing technologies, to film and literature. These five
rooms offer all this and more. There is much to be fathomed in Sear’s work, but
there is much to simply be felt as well.
