Strangely, it is the yearning of a cat for its too-soon separated mother that transpires as the singularly most traumatic image in the exhibition, ‘Trouble Set Me Free’. Kathy High’s cat plays a pivotal role in her video piece, Everyday Problems of the Living, as she enacts guileless performances of her fear of an encroaching death (which did not happen) and the impact her demise would have upon her animals. Her cat, having been denied the opportunity to suckle as a kitten, must now be content with suckling its owner’s pillow which carries a known and loved scent.
In Trouble Set Me Free Catherine Bell has curated an exhibition that energises and transforms the often spectral works, allowing the most intimate of encounters to occur in a quiet seductive manner in an show that flirts with the notions of death and trauma. We are able to navigate the ready juxtaposition of the glare of red blood dripping from a crocheted axe in Ax by Patricia Waller and Bronia Iwanczak’s black and white video piece, Many Fish Sacrifices, depicting a chef methodically slicing and gutting shiny, limp fish, without losing sight of the implicit intensity of the work of these artists. It is testimony to Bell’s curatorial engagement with the process of display.
Anxiety-raising devices that seduce, unnerve and amuse, strangely connect us in the recognition of a commonality of being that ends in death. However, there is no exuberant Freudian celebration of survival, no angels singing in exultation at another soul being set free. Here we tread upon the mournful reflection of what might have been, what had been and what is yet to come.
In the Phaedo Socrates pondered