Essay for Victoria Rance: The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon. Sculptures, drawings, photographs and animations 2007-2017

18/10/17

Essay for Victoria Rance: The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon

Victoria Rance: The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon

Sculptures, drawings, photographs and animations 2007-2017

Cello Factory, London

23-30 October 2017

A cast of black-and-white characters cavort across the screen: Rat Man, Long-Eared Bat Person and Loki, a mysterious shape-shifter and epitome of the Trickster. It is Fasnacht – a night of wearing masks and releasing one’s innermost repressed psychological realities. In Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes, the Trickster is an anti-intellect figure, entertaining and mischievous, yet bearing a deeper wisdom about the world. Fasnacht invites the Trickster to come out and play, and, in Victoria Rance’s short film, come out and play he does.

Much of Rance’s work deals with archetypes and the wearing of masks, exploring what Jung describes as the compromise between what one likes to be and how one likes to appear – the persona as it stands in contrast to the personality. Her cast of recurring characters, besides Loki and his friends, includes Medusa, Perseus, Nuit (the goddess of the sky), and, most recently, the Night Horse and the Holy Baboon. Her Sculptures to Wear include caterpillars, a worm, and wasp spiders – a striking variety of arachnid that disguises itself as a more harmful species to evade a common predator.

Full essay and catalogue available here

Image:

Victoria Rance

The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon 

2017

installation

wood, steel, felt, wool, palm, plaster, polyester

H 354cm

Interview with Liliane Lijn

14/03/14

Liliane Lijn: interview

  

When Liliane Lijn (b1939) invites us to her studio in Haringey, east London, on one of the wettest and windiest days of the year, we come bundled up in jumpers, expecting a large, cold, warehouse-type setting, but, instead, we are met by an assistant and ushered in for tea and biscuits in a beautifully spacious, well-lit, and, more importantly, well-heated studio-cum-gallery space.

After initial introductions and the removal of our soggy outer garments, Lijn conducts a thorough studio tour, turning on each of the amazing and sometimes ominously towering works from across her long career, creating a gentle background whirr, and beginning with some early koans (imperial white rotating cones with slivers of colour slicing through them at angles) and a collection of Poemcons (cones with text carved into them, lit from within, similarly rotating), she progresses via fragmentations of the self (for example, My Body, My Self, 1996) and tales of singing to looming feminine creations (her Cosmic Dramas series from the 80s), to fragmentations of her Aerogel pieces, resulting from a residency with NASA in 2005. With all this talk of stardust and lines of light interacting in four dimensions (the fourth being time), it is hard to believe that Lijn’s scientific knowledge is all self-taught. She shrugs this off nonchalantly, however: “That’s all science is, really, observation. I’m just interested in it and so I read.” It seems that a lot of Lijn’s success comes from “just being interested”. Over more biscuits and more tea, we continue to chat.

To read the interview and watch a video tour of Lijn's studio, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/liliane-lijn-interview