BEHIND APPEARANCE
Article by Alan Woods - Editor of Transcript Elaine Shemilt's work ranges across a wide variety of media. Initially, it focused on installation, with its multiple and unfixed viewpoints, its active involvement of the viewer's own body in an individual journey through the work; the various printmaking media, which have since themselves informed a number of installations, were initially used in an attempt to continue and develop the work of the installations by other means, rather than simply - and conventionally - record them through photography. If the event is inevitably lost, a new art work is launched from it, bearing a family resemblance; and, as themes and subjects occur and re-occur through the work, their generation and regeneration might usefully be imagined as located within an extended family of images. The work has always centred on the body, by now an established genre of late twentieth century art - but that context (and the accompanying commentary within feminist and cultural studies which the genre both inspires and illustrates) was initially lacking; this was pioneering work. An attempt should therefore be made initially to imagine the work as distinct, in its roots, from the obvious interpretative frameworks to which it might appear to be naturally related. Hitherto - and this persists deep within the layers of imagery of which the recent prints and paintings are made up - the body pictured has been the artist's own. The ways in which this matters or fails to matter are various, as various as the quicksilver meanings arising from the images and traces of that body throughout its history within the body of the work. Our perception of the work is changed if we know the body is the artist's, and if we know the artist - perhaps there are ways in which such work (perhaps like acting) can only be (in Gertrude Stein's phrase, when asked for whom she was writing) for oneself and strangers. But one can suggest something of the intent of the work, its continuous paradoxes across the personal and the universal, the naked and the nude, the specific and the mythical. In an early interview, Elaine answered the question of why she used her own body by suggesting that it was the only body about which she could be objective. Expanding in conversation on that striking answer in the context of the new work - I had suggested that the easiest reading of the use of one's own body was that it suggested subjectivity, introspection - Elaine began to tease out not just anecdotal material about the circumstances of creation, but through and beyond such material the deeper ambitions of the work. As with self-portraiture, the artist's own body is always there for the artist to work from; but Elaine was also subjecting the body to a number of procedures suggesting at best discomfort and at worst mental and physical torture and constraint, and to have done this - however symbolically - through a model would somehow have repeated the exploitation pictured.
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The pressures represented by, performed through images have involved the personal - as the explicit references to Plath's Bell Jar suggest - but the major themes - particularly birth and death (the body as corpse, particularly an ancient corpse) - involve personal experience as universal. And also as political: the pressures of a childhood in Northern Ireland were palpable, and without the work being 'about' Ireland, it came out of those pressures, that body politic. Nor is the recent work 'about' the civil war in what once was Yugoslavia, but it was provoked by it, and a horror held in common with us all may have led to a particular engagement with that horror through art because it was (so to speak) a fulfillment of a childhood fantasy/ prophecy/ fear of civil war. The reality to which it runs parallel, however, was not internalised, and - I am moving here into interpretation and away from an attempt to suggest intention - this also makes sense of a striking new source of body imagery in the new prints and paintings (and an installation which preceded them). There are many ways in which a flayed figure can be seen as a logical culmination as well as a reversal of the layers of materials and the bindings of earlier work; and the strange combination of activity and exposed internal structure in these anatomical demonstrations is equally a kind of mirror of our wonder at an earlier source, the miraculously preserved corpses from the bogs. And yet these new 'objective' bodies are also distant, as news footage is distant - and, equally, they are (unlike the artist's own body) two-dimensional in advance of the print in which they feature. They are also (again unlike the artist's own body) male, and - despite their scientific purpose - they echo the heroic, active nudity of history painting, violent as much as victims of violence. They are ideal rather than universal; a particular kind of abstract beauty has replaced a particular kind of identification; and a particular link to language - particular poets, myths, riddles - has also, however temporarily, departed from the work. The artist is no longer clearly both before and within the image, looking on and out at herself. There is continuity, but also change: the family has a new member. Pun intended.
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