Don't miss the opening of Nadia Hebson and Paul Becker's new exhibition space Vera Baxter -

Vera Baxter

Tess Denman-Cleaver, Nadia Hebson & Paul Becker

Essinge Brogata, 39. 11261 Opening 3-7pm Saturday 7th September

Call 0733497204 for entry

She encounters herself as neither problem nor solution, quest or fulfilment. As for ourselves, we are unable to think clearly about someone so elusive, so essentially absent. The glare turns back onto us somehow, engendering a little too much self-criticism or at least an uncomfortable amount of self-examination. Meanwhile, she is lying on a bed, toying idly with a rope of pearls.

Most of us like to offer the world at least the allusion of certitude even if, when communing secretly with ourselves, we understand the amount of deceit this entails. The truth is that we recognise very little in the details of our own why’s and wherefores. More important is how good are we at forgetting this. For all we know we are as naturally generous as we are reclusive. One has to fake things at times. At least creating the impression of definition and command offers up a comforting response. Is this not how entire governments function?

Q: Is it the role of art to appear to have all the answers or to represent the obvious facts of our helplessnesses?

V.B.: (…)

Being true to one’s nature sounds rather old fashioned now, don’t you think? And if one was to try and live that way, to live according to one’s nature then yes, perhaps one would lie about all day half naked, motionless, brushing the occasional dusting of cigarette ash off of a breast, staring up at a wall. Perhaps one would loom through all the rooms like a ghost. Boredom in some exists as a fully functioning conduit state between stasis and motion. The implications are that there are more important things one should be doing. But not with her. She is being, not doing.

She is not the person who knows what they are doing, nor never will be. For such a blessing, she has only the stars to thank. To hell with decipherable meaning, to hell with death and every other boring finality.

Sometimes, quite often, she will wear certain symbolic (to her alone) items of clothing to counteract or accentuate the lack of connection to her true nature, to her physical reality. Is this a tacit assertion of artifice? An ambiguous, wholly personal relationship to an idea of glamour? In the centre of a delicate hat, so light she forgets she is wearing it, is a black enamel bird, a swallow; in its mouth, a true pearl. She often wears a particular fur coat though only about the house. She despises fur. Usually it disgusts her. She cannot think which animal this pelt was taken from. When it is cold, she imagines the single hairs of the coat rising, almost shivering.

We hope there will be more details of what she wore in these moments as these things are interesting to us. How and why we dress the way we do beneath our clothes is a difficult question, an imponderable. It is a fruitless precept that the material lying closest to our skin speaks more clearly about ourselves than exterior appearance. Many prefer nakedness. Most lingerie fails to allow power to flow inwards, provoking nothing more than the usual conventions of male erotics. What she wears (and why) adheres to a set of codes that even she would not be able to fully explain but in many ways, how she dresses herself is for herself alone. Either way, the results are fascinating for us to watch. At least that is what we believe. She is and never was an obscure object of desire. An agency of desire is something else entirely. Her doing nothing possesses no kind of spiritual aspect. If anything, her reveries are closer to the inertia of an artistic sensibility: a dilettante, a would-be painter with no canvas, no urgency and no desire. Make. Don’t make. Her loungings, her vigils of nothingness have no particular beast in view. Is this even daydreaming? Could one even call this a reverie? She is dedicated to her stasis as a sculptor is to her chisel. Such things require solicitude and need to be tended to, meaning that her lack of all discipline must be rigorously applied. She utilises her precision, her detailing and only looks for intimacy with herself, not even her own thoughts. Discrimination is called for, even elegance.

Study the Instagram account of ___a._rose__.

Study the paintings of Meredith Frampton.

Please close the door gently on your way out. We are thinking.