Stephanie Vegh » Blog Archive » ‘Revisions’ at The Pearl Company

‘Revisions’ at The Pearl Company

I know it has been an obscenely long time since I’ve updated here – the insanity of moving both home and office inside the same month doesn’t really bear speaking about – but there’s few better ways to come back than with the announcement of a new exhibition.

Well, I say new but Revisions is more in the character of a retrospective of the years that have passed since I was assembling my degree show out at Glasgow’s Tramway. When the amazing Barbara Milne extended an invitation to install a show in her second-floor gallery at The Pearl Company, I was faced with limited notice and little time to produce new work (did I mention those moves?). This instead became an opportunity to reflect back on a sometimes haphazard creative practice that has solidified its own themes in the years I’ve spent making and thinking and working in Hamilton.

Given that they preoccupied two of those five years, Revisions includes a strong representation of bees – not only those initially produced for my 2010 exhibition at the Leeds College of Art and Design, but a selection of the hand-cut drawings that appeared in my installation at the Gladstone Hotel’s upArt Contemporary Art Fair last fall. My emphasis on these works allowed me to draw attention to the instinct towards swarming multiples that I brought back from Glasgow, as represented in the earliest works included in this show.

You Take My Breath Away (above) is a series developed from the aforementioned degree show when I was seeking a concise expression within a larger body of work depicting the love affair between a mermaid and a Russian cosmonaut. These birds, plucked out of upholstery fabric by a gesso editing job and aided in their breathing with worm-like oxygen tubes, were initially a simple analogue to my romantic cosmonaut; the further twenty-one versions I produced during my residency at Repton eventually shifted towards a more open meaning and took on the quality of a swarm.

By the time I was back in Canada and at work on The Plagues, I was better able to concentrate those repetitive energies into a sensibility that mimics the multiplicity of a book’s pages, the itching of a swarm of rats. It was a lesson that served me well when my attentions turned to Colony Collapse Disorder in the following year and I only wish they had been included in this show – unfortunately, they got missed in the move from one home and studio to the other.

The opening reception for Revisions is Thursday, April 12 starting at 7pm; the exhibition continues until May 28.