“Cecilia’s work this year once again returns to assembling and re-working found objects into fantastical combinations, that evoke strange feelings and fantasies. Here a kind of Dr Frankenstein aesthetic is on display, a 19th-century world, of mechanical and chemical interventions into the human body, and no doubt into the human spirit. Only, sometimes these strange fantasies of capturing and containing the human spirit really exist. Like the spooky x-ray of the human torso with a pacemaker. To echo, the translucent smoky image on the x-ray plate, Cecilia simulates the electrodes and pacemaker, and other strange devices for controlling the electro-magnetic life-force. In another piece, Cecilia who was trained as a silversmith, re-uses a rowlock – that is the piece on the side of a boat into which the oar is locked. Here she patinates this beautiful object which she sees as the Greek letter Psi, which might be short hand for Psyche, and lodges it in a vessel along with a coil of delicate chain. All mixed in with vessels for containment, this reminds me of those frightening Philip Pullman children’s books (the Dark Materials trilogy) in which captured children’s spiritual alter-egos, their so-called daemons, were severed, and cut-away from the child, in terrifying experiments. Later contained in vessels, the children were left like zombies, or the lobotomised. Cecilia’s are unnerving fantasy experiments with the ghost in the machine, messing with the mechanics, fiddling with the spirits.”
“Many of these pieces are constructed from discarded metal and glass objects, re-discovered, ca
red for, and encouraged into a new pristine beauty by Cecilia.” “ Another strange, chemistry-set technique Cecilia incorporates, is crystal growing. These, I am told, are copper sulphate crystals. They are in a kind of archetypal chemist’s beaker with triangular base and long neck, and in a piece called ‘Fuelling Dock’, these strange crystals give sustenance to what looks like a tiny coffee pot. Here we see chemicals, rather than mechanical means, being used to mess with our spirits, to meddle with our wavering moods. This piece reminds us of the psychoactive drugs we use – coffee, alcohol, sugar as well as harder stuff – to manipulate our senses, o
r our flagging will. An alternative to this can be found in the piece called “Incendiary thoughts”, where the artist felt a kind of bottled up energy, which she said could light a fire. Here she provides a copper electric circuit and electrodes, to light a briquette.
Finally on one of the most poignant and spare pieces on di
splay, is a tiny antique doll standing isolated, abandoned on a game of snakes and ladders. She is about to head downwards as she stands on the head of a snake. Snakes & Ladders is the great gaming symbol of our topsy-turvy life, the vagaries, the accidents, the arbitrary nature of fate, and the throwing of the dice. Against this hard, arbitrary world we are all abandoned and naked in the end. Or so Cecilia maybe felt at that moment perhaps. This is a strange, and stimulating show, of electrodes, clamps, pumps, containers, mechanical toys, all given new meaning and renewed life by the artist’s eye.
John Montague
09.09. 2009
