Rebecca Halliwell Sutton Openings

Rebecca Halliwell-Sutton: Openings

Exhibition text, Recent Activity, Birmingham

2024

In her remarkably perceptive collection of essays on the temporal and spatial edges of human presence, Kathleen Jamie recounts a visit to La Cueva de la Pileta, a cave in Southern Spain where walls are covered with Neolithic paintings estimated to be over 20,000 years old. Descending past the opening in the ground, Jamie observes a moment of transgression, a sharpened sense of being in the body, as if tapping into the unconscious. “We have entered a body, and are moving through its ducts and channels and sites and processes. The very chamber we stand in is streaked with iron-red; it’s like the inside of a cranium, a mind-space, as though the cave were thinking us.”^[1] An opening in a cave is a sole source of light tracking the passage of time; stepping further into enclosed galleries with wall paintings one encounters a sudden sense of proximity to the beginnings of human presence, dissolving conventional linear perception of time.

In Rebecca Halliwell-Sutton’s Openings, softly undulating sheets of aluminium peel off the floor, exposing a dark cave-like streak underneath, as a kind of cross-section of a landscape. Reflecting light off the surface, the works emerge as thresholds, seemingly reconciling the conflicting notions of animate and industrial, spontaneous and controlled, resilient and brittle. Right angles and shimmering surface of each sheet unequivocally recall mechanised refinement of a mined material, indirectly referencing the distinct meaning of underground caverns as sources of extraction in the capitalist society. Repeatedly striking the surface of each aluminium sheet with hammers of varying dimensions, the artist literally enacts the process of excavation, as if seeking to uncover unresolved mental spaces at the intersection of contemporary and prehistoric. As she notes, “my practice is a ressurfacing of the unconscious; the unknowable can re-emerge and become part of the world.”

Installed close to one another, the three panels suggest glimpses of landscapes seen from above – a plateau joining the valleys, and an archipelago of volcanic formations. Concurrently, the sweeping cavities in some of the panels delineate a human body lying on the side, as if one has encountered pre-historic human remains. The human form is pierced by a radial network of lines hammered into the sheet, so that the intersection point becomes the deepest and simultaneously most fragile, eventually breaking into an opening. Shifted downwards around the abdominal area of the figure, the openings evoke a womb, a reflection on ancestry and lineage. Ranging from recognisable embryo-like forms to circular craters corresponding to points of contact between a reclining figure and ground, an elbow, shoulder or calf, the reliefs induce a sense of familiarity, of one’s own body touching the earth. As John Berger writes on the 1991 discovery of the remains of a pre-historic man preserved in ice, “All bodies have so much in common, more than we habitually remember until we see one named, or until we deliberately touch one another. The similitude, however, is not a conclusion but a starting point. It is where empathy begins. Seeing the naked body of another […], we make an inventory of the sensations to be felt in each part, one by one. All of them wordless, all of them indescribable, yet all of them, distinct and familiar, all of them constituting a home.”^[2]

Maria Hinel

[1] Kathleen Jamie, Sightlines, P. 166

[2] John Berger in Theatre de Complicite, Mnemonic, 1999, p. 76

Photos courtesy of the artist

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