L. Stonebridge on the solo exhibition 'A Guarded Hush', 2009
If the images that Anika Carpenter imagines in her work actually existed, the world would be a lighter, sweeter and more gentle place than it is now. Hers is a world which wears its significances lightly: feathers brush past memories of a desire that was always the sweeter for having died; leaves dust the cheek of the walking dreamer; artists live in fairy tale egos, where empty chairs are full of the charm of one just gone. This is a world in which one loses one perspective in order to gain another, smaller, stiller and more perfect for being, one senses, so fragile.
Fragile, in Carpenter’s work, emphatically does not mean vulnerable. What is fragile about the world, for her, is its transience. Something of the new (and possibly not quite so new) romantic persists in these images: the trees, the leaves, the waves of the shore are glimpses of a life lived ‘in nature’ resonantly for those who take the time to stop to see it (‘I looked up and there it was’). But if there’s a poetry here it’s one which, like Ian Hamilton Finlay’s, knows its relation to language. This is what poetry does, Carpenter says, it makes you believe that the leaf is writing to you – that the image somehow speaks. So when you re-discover the hairs on a lover’s arms in the grasses of the Norfolk coastline, or when you see white fingers dragging down the surf of the waves of the German Ocean, you are not so much seeing nature, as reading the words that are making something of it; words that are somehow themselves more sexy than the image with which they play or the putative body they recall. It is this kind of knowing craftiness of that provides much of Carpenter’s humour. Don’t take my ability to remake the world in another image too seriously, this work says. So when Carpenter’s nature starts talking a little dirty, it does so without pomposity. The gnarled nooks and crannies of her trees, the gauche sensuousness of their branches are what they are meant to be: kinky.
If the poetry of this work is about the beauty of small significances, the story it tells is a somewhat bigger narrative about art itself; about the contingency of its making, and the difficulty of its exhibiting. As much as Carpenter wants to magnify the moment, she also wants to diminish the ‘art world’. In fact, one senses, the two ambitions are directly related: the smaller one can make the institutional paraphernalia of the exhibition (the oeuvre, the market, the self-consciousness that makes art and compromises it at the same time, etc.,) the bigger the ordinariness of the moments Carpenter wants us to appreciate can seem. So she puts her ‘art work’ in miniature Chinese boxes; as exterior becomes interior the space of ‘Art’ contracts to let the world in the work expand. We look at ourselves looking, all the better to look. The space of the studio becomes a small, diminished thing in order precisely to protect the integrity of its contents.
If this all makes art seem fragile, once again, we should not confuse this with any needy vulnerability. There is a defensiveness here: Carpenter doesn’t so much desire to be small and insignificant as an artist herself, as to cut the world down to size. She values the clarity which comes with the miniature, the micro-moment, the small encounter. What she also wants is a clarity about intimacy; the intimacy implied, for example, in the relation between nature and our memories, but also the intimacy of the creative process itself. All this converges in ‘Headstone’ which is, quite literally, Anika’s signature’s piece. The fairy tale cottage, which is also an egg and which is almost certainly also a kind of ego, bears the name of its maker lightly but emphatically. Here we are, both the signature and the egg say, perfect, white, alone and yet, friendly, generous with our interiors – see our small window, and come and look at just how pristine the world can look. Loose your perspective for a moment and you can feel the leaf dust your cheek.
Anika Carpenter shrinks and simplifies the world so that it becomes both more manageable and more magical. Carpenter’s work allows me to dream of a day when, the air cuts clean through the branches of tree, when moments manage to happen and not threaten. In this world we could re-arrange the places where we work and live so that we could tell new stories about them. Then the world would stand still, quiet and new.
Fragile, in Carpenter’s work, emphatically does not mean vulnerable. What is fragile about the world, for her, is its transience. Something of the new (and possibly not quite so new) romantic persists in these images: the trees, the leaves, the waves of the shore are glimpses of a life lived ‘in nature’ resonantly for those who take the time to stop to see it (‘I looked up and there it was’). But if there’s a poetry here it’s one which, like Ian Hamilton Finlay’s, knows its relation to language. This is what poetry does, Carpenter says, it makes you believe that the leaf is writing to you – that the image somehow speaks. So when you re-discover the hairs on a lover’s arms in the grasses of the Norfolk coastline, or when you see white fingers dragging down the surf of the waves of the German Ocean, you are not so much seeing nature, as reading the words that are making something of it; words that are somehow themselves more sexy than the image with which they play or the putative body they recall. It is this kind of knowing craftiness of that provides much of Carpenter’s humour. Don’t take my ability to remake the world in another image too seriously, this work says. So when Carpenter’s nature starts talking a little dirty, it does so without pomposity. The gnarled nooks and crannies of her trees, the gauche sensuousness of their branches are what they are meant to be: kinky.
If the poetry of this work is about the beauty of small significances, the story it tells is a somewhat bigger narrative about art itself; about the contingency of its making, and the difficulty of its exhibiting. As much as Carpenter wants to magnify the moment, she also wants to diminish the ‘art world’. In fact, one senses, the two ambitions are directly related: the smaller one can make the institutional paraphernalia of the exhibition (the oeuvre, the market, the self-consciousness that makes art and compromises it at the same time, etc.,) the bigger the ordinariness of the moments Carpenter wants us to appreciate can seem. So she puts her ‘art work’ in miniature Chinese boxes; as exterior becomes interior the space of ‘Art’ contracts to let the world in the work expand. We look at ourselves looking, all the better to look. The space of the studio becomes a small, diminished thing in order precisely to protect the integrity of its contents.
If this all makes art seem fragile, once again, we should not confuse this with any needy vulnerability. There is a defensiveness here: Carpenter doesn’t so much desire to be small and insignificant as an artist herself, as to cut the world down to size. She values the clarity which comes with the miniature, the micro-moment, the small encounter. What she also wants is a clarity about intimacy; the intimacy implied, for example, in the relation between nature and our memories, but also the intimacy of the creative process itself. All this converges in ‘Headstone’ which is, quite literally, Anika’s signature’s piece. The fairy tale cottage, which is also an egg and which is almost certainly also a kind of ego, bears the name of its maker lightly but emphatically. Here we are, both the signature and the egg say, perfect, white, alone and yet, friendly, generous with our interiors – see our small window, and come and look at just how pristine the world can look. Loose your perspective for a moment and you can feel the leaf dust your cheek.
Anika Carpenter shrinks and simplifies the world so that it becomes both more manageable and more magical. Carpenter’s work allows me to dream of a day when, the air cuts clean through the branches of tree, when moments manage to happen and not threaten. In this world we could re-arrange the places where we work and live so that we could tell new stories about them. Then the world would stand still, quiet and new.