All The Things I Love...
A Winter Story, Su Blackwell, 2009, book-cut sculpture
Work by Su Blackwell goes on show at Edinburgh’s Scottish Gallery this December (until 24 December)
Although one of Blackwell’s book sculptures on show here is entitled Out of Narnia and depicts a glittering winter wonderland complete with palace, full moon and fir trees, this show is neither typically Christmassy nor feel-good. In fact quite the opposite, as the depressing, faintly solipsistic exhibition title, All the Things I Love Are Going to Disintegrate, implies. The main focus is a dress installation called While You Were Sleeping which references the Burmese tradition that people’s souls turn into butterflies while they sleep and if you wake them up the soul doesn’t have time to return to the body so they die. It consists of pale pink dress suspended, ghost-like, in the air, surrounded by a swarm of delicately fluttering silk moths (representing the dead body’s soul). It’s beautifully made, but the delicacy of the silk and the wings of the moths emphasise what Blackwell gloomily calls ‘the precariousness of the world we inhabit and the fragility of our life, dreams and ambitions’.
A second dress installation, in which the dress is transformed into a rhododendron bush, is displayed alongside a group of Blackwell’s better-known, wonderfully intricate, book sculptures.
www.scottish-gallery.co.uk
