This summer, Sarah Myerscough Gallery presents Eleanor Lakelin’s second solo exhibition, titled Intimations. The show marks the evolution of a growing cast of experiments in Lakelin’s ongoing exploration of the vessel form. Born amidst the overgrowth of memory and matter, perennial themes of liminality, entropy, and classical order continue to underwrite the work’s otherworldly spirit. A deepening dialogue between machined form and the chaotic emergence of burr is staged between each piece. Together they animate a universal physics of inside and outside, or void and containment, synonymous with the rituals and symbolism historically poured in and out of one of civilisation’s oldest object forms.
Intimations witnesses a shift in the kind of presence the vessel form might articulate. Its dimensions are stretched and expanded. Its form is pushed to new limits, and in certain instances turned inside-out, surface and material becoming medium for something perhaps more akin to a mass, a figure, or a body. Allegories between the vessel form and personhood are here at their most corporeal. The evolving presence we find in Intimations is one of a communion gradually coming into focus, a scene in which a studio begins to feel populated by beings of a different character, an arrival from what seems to be both past and future, or something else altogether.
“In her skilled hands Lakelin animates the raw material with her own energy, time, and vision, breathing life-force into the dead wood, intimating the presence of a quietly breathing transcendent being.”
– Christian Larson, independent curator and art historian, previous curator at Museum of Arts & Design New York
