Morwenna Kearsley: APPARATUS

By Greg Thomas, 25.11.2024

Morwenna Kearsley, install photo from APPARATUS. Photo by Chao-Ying Rao 2024

In several artworks from Apparatus, Morwenna Kearsley’s formally inventive new show at Strange Field, Glasgow, we see parts of the artist’s anatomy (mostly head, face, and eyes) obscured by photographic equipment. A number of constructivist-esque collages, including ‘Contact Sheet’ and ‘Tilt and Shift’, show the artist’s face replaced by an oval cut-out of camera machinery. In one small portrait shot, ‘Reflector’, a reflective disc is held across the face to white out the image. These are neat metaphors for the ways in which the show not only venerates the mechanics of analogue photography – elevates it to a subject in and of itself – but also teases apart how photographic representation can complicate, disguise, and refract its subject-matter. 

Glasgow-based artist Kearsley has been exploring the creative potential of analogue photography, and subverting its material processes, for some years. In 2021’s Notch Code, held at Edinburgh’s Curfew gallery, contact prints were made from enlarged negatives, the resulting works a direct imprint of their mirror-image forebears. In Leave the Dishes, Poke the Jelly, held at Glasgow’s CCA in 2020, various forms of colour inversion trained attention on the strange alchemy of the darkroom, with all its surrealist potency and exotic culinary analogies. Suitably enough, the show was partly an homage to the Surrealist photographer and latterly food writer Lee Miller.

One piece in this show, ‘Outtakes’, seems to revive a similar format. Indeed, this new selection of works seems partly like an amalgamation of various lines of creative enquiry pursued over the last few years. The introductory image, ‘Camera Body’ – printed as a huge mirror-image diptych, confronting the viewer on entrance – is of a hand raised above a camera hood. The limb seems to dissipate into shadow at its extremity. It’s a suitable point of entry, with the implication that, as the medium becomes the message, the message itself may lose definition.

In similar fashion, the aforementioned collage pieces – which have a strong flavour of modernist photo-montage about them, El Lissitzky’s ‘Constructor’ et al – literally efface the camera’s traditional subject while simultaneously pulling focus to the means of representation. A century on, these appeal partly as arrière-garde homage. But there is something fresh and pungent in the reclamation of what are, for most non-professional photographers, dormant media. Also, of course, the subject is now very often female, as it is here 

There are pieces placed on the floor (another very modernist conceit) which seem like cameraless photographs in the style of, say, Moholy-Nagy’s photograms. The quartet of works entitled ‘CMY’ show fingers, palms, and various flat rectangular surfaces (perhaps earlier iterations of the same pieces – it would suit the mood) apparently passed over photosensitive surfaces during exposure. These works in cyan, magenta, and yellow resonate with allusions to the history of conceptual photography but have a flavour, a taste, of their own too.

All this is very much of a piece. But there’s more going on, reflecting Kearsley’s parallel interest in the elevation of inert objects to the subject of portraiture. This is an idea expressed strongly in 2022’s Fonds, a collaboration with Greater Govanhill Magazine where residents of the south Glasgow district selected items of emotional resonance, which were then photographed against luxurious fabric backdrops, like living talismans of familial and personal narrative.

In this show we find at least three works in a similar style. There are two big, hanging silver gelatin prints, ‘Exposure Triangle’ parts one and two, flecked at top and bottom with the gloriously messy chemical marks that the process yields, showing odd, rough-hewn found sculptures placed at roadsides. (Elements of concrete roadworks? They have a functional, municipal feel.) In another piece, ‘Prism’, reviving the format of the 2022 project, a prism is placed on plush purple velvet. In ‘Interrupted Poem’, a photographed line of Auden’s “I Am Not a Camera” reads “To call our sight, Vision implies that, to us, all objects are subjects.” This seems to be claimed as a credo of sorts for this aspect of the artist’s practice.

The prism appears as a motif at several points, sometimes with an eye visible through each surface. The optic splits its object, the human body, into fragments. There is something, finally, about the female body and person in this and other conceits: the ways in which the camera has played tricks with our perception of it, forced it into uncomfortable shapes. A reclamation of sorts is taking place as well as a deconstruction. Catch it if you can.

APPARATUS by Morwenna Kearsley is showing at Strange Field, Glasgow, ended 24^th November