Natalie Sirett Art
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Natalie Sirett Art

Glasgow, Joinery & a Vision of Hell

12/10/2014

 
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I have just spent a few days in the handsome city of Glasgow, with its stone tenements,  good people and vistas of mountains - even from the city centre. I spent most of my time exploring the university's Stirling Maxwell Collection* of early printed books, manuscripts and emblem books, finding intriguing images or series' of images that cannot be fully 'read' /understood without their accompanying text. I love the many nature-related maxims: a crab with the world on its back is accompanied by the text "Sic Orbis Iter" - The Way of the World. Text and image combined suggest that it is the nature of the world to go backwards.   
                                                                                 *Although did see an amazing Hamlet at the Citizens Theatre.


In London the work on my own image series' continues. Moving on from DeTOXIFY-ME, I wanted to continue joining pictures into story using some kind of object rather than a flat canvas as my starting point. Working on wooden boxes in the Detoxify series flagged up several advantages. A box opens and closes like a book and offers a continuous series of surfaces that can be walked around as a story is told. After spending many a long hour looking at junk shops and e-bay curiosities, I hit on the idea of using printers' trays, those drawers used to store printing blocks, and discovered that these fabulous constructions offer all kinds of narrative potential. I am now busily, building trap doors between images, breaking down walls to connect them, erecting new walls to separate them and chiseling the occasional tunnel. There is  so much potential for storytelling in the opening, closing, echoing and mirroring of one image with another. I am thinking of it as a new kind of joinery and have begun to make an atheist vision of EARTH, HEAVEN AND HELL.
 This piece (pictured), is very much a work in progress. I had expected that traditional symbolism would play a larger role than is (at least currently), the case. There is a pomegranate with Persephone’s six seeds, but this Hell is peopled with documented and familiar images of modern humanity: the young girls gang-raped and hung in India, the train tracks to the gates of Auschwitz, James Foley kneeling in the desert, torturers at Abu Ghraib, Pol Pot’s store of skulls.... There are images of addiction too: a figure drowns in a sea of bottles, the heroin poppy and the syringe...
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EARTH, HEAVEN & HELL In Progress 32"x42" 2014
PictureHELL (in Progress) oil and gold leaf on wood 32"x14" 2014
 It's an experience to carefully gild a swastika and paint the faces of murdered children. On the whole I am looking forward to moving up to Earth!

So I am engaged in a massive investigation of Good and Evil. It's an epic undertaking. As is so often the case, I recently read something that explains exactly how this feels. In the dedication of East of Eden (another epic on the same subject), John Steinbeck offers the novel to his publisher, describing it as a box.
“Everything I have is in it...Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good and bad and evil thoughts – the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation… And still the box is not full.” 


Which brings us neatly back to boxes.
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