AT THE EDGES
By Ned McConnell —
Touch is so often associated with the meeting of two surfaces; the freshness of bare feet on cool tiles on a hot day, the comfort of leaning on a radiator during winter, or the softness of lush grass underfoot. But perhaps real touch is about an exchange of material, a permeation through what we consider the exterior of ourselves into our substance. In this way touch always stays with us, it alters us, however slightly. I visited a cousin in hospital some years ago, she had an infection and a small tear in her lung that meant her skin membrane was filling with air and her eyelids were forced shut. Throughout the ordeal, touch had become a vitally important, comforting communication for her, so we sat holding hands as we talked. In those moments, hands clasped, closing the gap between our edges, I formed a new version of myself. As is so often the case with grief.
Edges, membranes, skins are typical elements of many artworks, there is invariably a beginning and an end whether installation, sculpture, video or as with the work of Yelena Popova, painting and tapestry. However, with Popova, edges become a centrifugal force. The paintings are testimonies, a record of the ongoing moment when the edges of the past and present touch. She could be thinking about the deep time of geology where the afterimage echoes in the strata of soil and indeed connects deeply to the earth through her practice of extracting pigments from the land. She could also be referencing the bodily act of painting, each work a lasting document of time spent in the studio; touching the millennia old pigment, contemplating her place in the long history of the universe.
This physical tactility is also present in the imagery she paints here. The works conjure cells blobbing through some organic matter, membranes bumping into one another. On the other hand, they could be galaxies swirling. They create a juncture for the tension created between the macrocosmic and microcosmic. Popova wants people to inhabit this space, to feel the edges of the beings and material that have connected over the millennia that Earth has been in existence, and possibly before. The ephemerality of this imagery here is solidified, a momentary document of the teeming matter of life. Painting as documentation is a rarity, photography having long since usurped this position, but here Popova encapsulates both the somatic and the cerebral, the physicality of presence and the imaginative act of remembrance.
Popova’s preoccupation with deep time could be seen as a rather clinical or scientific connection, her interest in the pigments and chemical make up of rocks and geology a cold view on the world. However, she is deeply rooted in touching the past, touching materials of the universe, connecting to people, animals and things that have brought her to where she is now, and embracing that fleeting moment. In the works presented in Of Dust and Breath she collects pigments from soil and clay in Scotland, the fleshy, bodily pinks and browns coming from its rich iron oxide (sometimes used as a supplement to increase Iron levels in the blood). Connecting our bodies to the deep time of the universe is challenging, as a species we have alienated ourselves not just from one another but the planet we have evolved to inhabit. Perhaps one way of reconnecting is to embrace the permeable edges of our bodies, to accept that our bodies are open and a daily exchange takes place with the world around us. In John Donne’s (1572–1631) posthumously published poem The Flea, the author describes how a flea is the agent that conjoins him with a lover who refuses bodily intimacy:
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
For Donne in 1590, this mingling of blood is the act of consummation, the permeability and sharing of bodies writ large across the globe through the ubiquity of parasites. The interior, microscopic intimacy played out here can be seen in Popova’s paintings, the grains of pigments, the cell structure imagery and the awareness of our own mortality that comes with the grief of a death; that we will all entropically return to the chaos of the universe from which we came.
Curiously, alongside the microscopic interior spaces of the painted works, are small sculptural works – found objects that lend an exteriority or otherworldliness to the show. Small branches that could be sceptres or wands are presented here as cradles for small round paintings or placed on top to gently caress their edges. The branches have visible scars on them, common in all trees are round orifices that appear when a tree gets a fungal infection or their tissue is damaged, but since trees cannot heal their damaged tissue they simply grow new wood over the top, called woundwood. As the branches balance on and around the paintings they show their scars, records of the past in the present. Also nearby is a brick, worn and shaped by the sea. Manufactured from natural clay millions of years old, it played its role in a dwelling perhaps before it slowly returns to the natural world with the gentle caress of the waves. Rebuilding connections with the world around her, these natural elements speak to Popova’s spiritualism and the space she inhabits, both psychic and physical.
Spiritualism is deeply ingrained in Popova’s world, here she disrupts the ambiguous imagery of cells and amorphous shapes in her paintings that guide a route into a personal interpretive space with a graphic tapestry work. Using imagery of Ouroboros and the Tree of Life, Popova brings in tangible references to her exploration of weaving, also a feature of the surfaces beneath the paintings. Of Greek/Egyptian origin, the Ouroboros is a snake eating its own tail, creating a never-ending cycle of destruction and rebirth. Snakes are a feature of more creation myths than any other symbol, their ubiquity is striking and anthropologist James Narby, in his book The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, even goes so far as to suggest that they could represent our own DNA. He posits that DNA offers an ancient knowledge, surfacing through intuition.
The coming together of the physical and the psychic in Popova’s work is grounding. This work is about us, it is about our very fabric and how we are connected to the world around us. I forever have pieces of my cousin within me, have forever been changed both psychically and physically by my experience of that bereavement. The interior spaces of Popova’s work ask questions of where our edges start and end; atomically we’re all made of the same elements. The works encourage a deep contemplation of what it means to live with other people and bodies, to share their spaces, their breath and their dust.
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Ned McConnell is a curator and writer. He is curator at the Roberts Institute of Art where he commissions performances, develops exhibitions and delivers the RIA Residency alongside other public programmes in relation to the David and Indrė Roberts Collection.
He is a writer for Art Monthly and has written variously for other publications. He has also written various catalogue texts including for Ryan Gander's exhibition The Rates of Change at Space K, South Korea in 2021; Flesh Arranges Itself Differently at The Hunterian, Glasgow in 2022; and Deep Horizons at MIMA in 2023
YELENA POPOVA ~ Of Dust and Breath
IONE & MANN
September - November 2024
Photography by Matt Spour Courtesy of IONE & MANN