Sketches for the Future

For miart 2024, Belmacz will spotlight the practices of two artists: Coco Crampton and Charlott Weise.

Penned in 1939, Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical essay ‘A Sketch of the Past’ puts forward the idea that the self is an everchanging thing — an interweaving of fragments, pasts and presences. Written in a fragmentary nature itself, the text performs, much like a being, in a relational manner, looping memories into a philosophical narration; in a way that defies the artificial pizzazz of modern life. As with her literary work, Woolf’s philosophical Sketch foregrounds the importance of life’s small moments to the conditions of our present — our presence. Specifically, the sensory occurrences — the sights and sounds and smells — from our past which suddenly reappear in the present so as to render our now “a thousand times deeper” than any smooth prepositioning. These shocking “moments of being” make reality unreal, critically affording us an opportunity to sense the full relationality of life; thereby allowing us to think beyond the “background rods” which condition our social selves.

Coco Crampton and Charlott Weise’s artistic outlooks can be seen to sit akin to Woolf’s thinking. Respectively, across sculpture and painting, Crampton and Weise draw upon the past, the overlooked and undervalued textures which weave to form a being, re-articulating these to suspend the monotonous flows of modern life. As something of a conversation across media, this dual presentation celebrates the allusive nature of each artist’s practice.

Coco Crampton’s practice stems from an interest in the design icons of the long 20^th century. Breathing new life into otherwise antiquated forms, Crampton co-opts craft traditions to create sculptural works which playfully twist the objective stylings of domestic life. Belmacz’s presentation at miart 2024, spotlights Crampton’s ceramic practice; a range of deliquescent neon chandeliers float aside a shelf of ‘functionless’ pots. United by both their clay bodies and the visuality of their long protrusions, these works suspend expected functions, transforming otherwise utilitarian matter into animate bodies — lampshades become lithe jellyfish-like forms whilst ceramic teapots become woodland creatures: squirrels, owls, and the like. Sitting with Crampton’s associative works, the mind drifts, sensorial memories of sunny days by seashores and ample walks through wooded paths appear in our minds, demonstrating how beneath the cotton wool of domestic life lies a hidden pattern; how, to quote Woolf, “the whole world is a work of art” and how we are parts of this everchanging artwork: “we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.” Performing anew, Crampton’s hand-crafted artworks allow us to glimmer — to find joy in — the relationality of life.

Reflecting upon how femininity is performed across a range of cultural fields — from historical figurative painting to literature and the mainstream media — Charlott Weise’s paintings can be seen as forms of intuitive image-based writing. In these images, interior worlds unfold as rich narrative mise-en-scène; female archetypes find themselves slipping between, in and out of, thick plotlines both banal and bombastic. Finding inspiration in Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion according to G.H., the five-panel frieze, Herself In Passage (2020), presented at miart reads as an absurdist layering of diaristic entries — as literary fragments cut from an existence ­— which weave together to render the temporal nature of being; or at least to demonstrate how a being is an innately liquidus thing, a washing together of emotive states beyond the didact and the logistically discernible. For Weise the intuitive process of applying oil to canvas holds a capacity to communicate sensory experiences which words alone cannot embody. Echoing the attentiveness of Lispector’s prose, Weise’s narrative is a mighty record of an anomalous life — be this the life of Lispector’s protagonist, Weise’s own or a subconscious weaving of the two. Human in scale, the multivalent scenes of Herself In Passage not only envelop us within the throes of a slippery storyline but arouse a subjective encounter, one wholly conjured through the poetic action of putting paint to canvas.

Much like Woolf’s Sketch, Crampton and Weise’s respective artworks give a new depth to reality. By drawing upon the small, extra-sensorial, moments that interweave to form a being their artworks suspend the sheeny frames that enclose an existence. In turn they afford us an opportunity to think physically about the role of objects and bodies within the plays of everyday life. Indeed, they allow us to think what these plays could be: acting as sketches for the future.