Feast aluminium, powdercoat, pewter, 23ct gold leaf, gold plate 2002
Outside, the grey yellow fountains of the arc welder threw down the light into the oily pavement puddles. The light struck the welder’s metal boots in glowing chips. He wore his halo around his feet. I questioned him again, but all he said was ‘People vanish everyday.’
He sealed the door into the frame.
Pearl Gillies exquisite cast and soldered objects invite us into a series of cultural and historical vanishings and imaginings. The artist does not merely ‘quench’ her delicate, soldered joins (a process metaphor of thirsty desire), she also wilfully pours her molten metals down those particular metaphorical rabbit holes connecting the literary and material realms.
Artists are adept at dreaming art-historical forms and ideas into resonant materialities; but so often, the borrowing of literary narratives into paint or three-dimensional form invites a charge of ‘theatricality’ or sentimentality. Literary allusion, like humour has often been sidelined as expressive indulgence; as something adjacent to the more serious formal and conceptual debates of modernism.
Gillies' cleverness is to ransack literary representations of scale as a visual artist in playful post-modernist mode. Yet her control and finesse of architectural imaging is never threatened by an excess of story-telling; by an attempt to 'write' too much literary quotation into the three-dimensional work.
The spatial tropes of Alice in Wonderland are set up in a series of crystalline teacup ballets. The journey down the rabbit hole is implied—we are already anxiously helping Alice to set the table for a crabby Queen of Hearts; the immaculate, elegant plinths assure us of all imminent hierarchies. But as afternoon tea tables go, we are not presented with a relentlessly stylised elegance; for the imperfections of the casting and soldering processes sit alongside objects of formal and technical seamlessness. For example, the devolving, melted pewter forms of ‘Pewter Set’ (2002) make a witty Oldenburgian counterpoint to the process perfection of ‘Miniature Cups and Saucers and Spoons’ (2002). The contrast seems critical in shifting the more finished works away from the pure modernist elegance of those tea sets we might conventionally associate with the oeuvre of an Olive Cotton or a Gwen Hansen Piggott. The melted/melting tea set suggests something to us of the mutability of ritual, and by implication perhaps, the mutable nature of connoisseurship, the high cultural fetishising of the ritual object. Quite equally, the collection of teaspoons and the 1950’s pastel colours and silhouettes of the miniatures shift us away from the poetic fiefdom of Lewis Carroll and into a more local social world of a ‘cuppa tea, a bex and a good lie down.’ These are the cups and spoon of souvenirist delight. On the one hand they may evoke a nostalgia for the memory of a young Queen Elizabeth, but the social memory has been de-scaled; these are not mere museum pieces - they are fragments that recede and retreat from an ‘accurate’ rendition of a social past, that suggest the impossibility of accurate ‘capture’ of any souvenirist, or ‘sippist’ moments in time.
The next question arises-which teaset to use? Which cultural and material context to partake of? How to decide? How to become our own tea-set connoisseur? How to imbibe? Any white-rabbit anxiety about being late, late for a very important date becomes grafted to our own symbolic anxiety as we fall between stools of cast miniature perfection and the expansive beakers of ‘Feast’ ( 2002) and ‘Spooning’ (also 2002).We are able to choose between the architecture of an impossible doll’s house, or the salon du thé of some well-heeled giant with a fetish for Rosenthal.
Here, Gillies has plunged us into a fabulous sur-reality—yet the immaculate detailing and imagining work insists that these are never gratuitous ‘settings’; like poor Alice, we are simply not privy to the correct etiquette.
Gillies' choice of materials also contributes to the efficacy of these dream-like transmogrifications. The materials evoke the richness of a whole range of cultural 'kingdoms' in the way that Italo Calvino's poetic prose might evoke a series of fictive cityscapes.
.Leaving there and proceeding for three days towards the East, you reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a crystal theatre, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower..
Gillies' objects could easily be imagined as receptacles belonging to so many invisible cities. As each city might have its own ritualistic usage for holder, cup or jug; it has also has its requisite precious material. The material is not specific to period per se, but to the elusive worlds or civilisations that Gillies evokes.
I read Gillies' pewter 'Tall Tulip' (2002), with its filigree patterns and stylised joins and tabs, less as a direct allusion to the 'use' of pewter in medieval and renaissance vessel making, but as a trope for the cross-cultural play of metal over centuries of time. Pure investigations of pewter sit adjacent to concentrations of nickel silver, enamel and gold plate and sterling silver. Precious metals sit self-consciously against alloyed materials and soldering lead; both types of metals are 'deployed' as concentrated, iconic explorations of form and function, and then also as explorations of anti-form and dys-function.
'Deer Tankard' (2002) is a vessel that is over-scaled, but still arguably utilitarian, or functional. In contrast, the filigree tulip vessel is permeable; a mere silhouette of functionality; a giant vase that will not ever hold flower, tea or water. These neo-baroque decorations seem to mock the will-to-function evident in the teacups on the next plinth; quite equally this contrast might mock our own cultural and historical desire for functionality; a beleaguered modernist dictate.
Industrial and traditional techniques are applied to these crystalline materials. A richly symbolic confusion of time arises therefore. Gillies suggests an ‘alloyed’ history of form and function that is practical and imaginative, but finally untraceable to a specific cultural epoch. Each wondrous object is redolent with associations culled allusively and thoughtfully from the cup of literature and craft histories.
