Supernatural Light Affinity features new work by Ali Noble, Helen Shelley, Yvette Hamilton, and Lisa Sammut. While the breadth of work in the show is substantial, the defining mood of the exhibition is theatrical: throughout the gallery, theatre black contrasts against pastel pinks, purples, and luminous blues; draped curtains, velvet, glitter, and light projections are repeated elements. The artists play with hanging heights and space. Moveable walls create passages and block sightlines. The exhibition unfolds in a series of acts.
Entering ANCA Gallery, your first sightline of the exhibition is of two walls set perpendicular to one other, hung with a single wall-based work by Ali Noble and Helen Shelley respectively. Through the gap between these two walls, a second work by Noble draws the viewer into the gallery space proper. This first view sets up a juxtaposition of strong blacks and soft pastels that will continue throughout the exhibition.
Nobel’s wall-based fabric assemblages are of intimate scale. Constructed by cutting and gluing abstract shapes of pastel and black velveteen, Own Alphabet for Love and Cosmic Sensual are symbolic invitations to the gallery audience. The luminous quality and tactile nature of the velveteen juxtaposes with the crisp lines and strong contrast. The works are reminiscent of tarot cards and the abstraction of Hilma af Klint.'
In Our Late Loved Ones, Shelley covered a solid black base with methodical traces of glitter that catch the light. Created in the period following the death of the artist’s father, the work evokes a kind of grasping: glimmers of memories and intangible threads that are your enduring sense of someone lost.
Emerging from the entry passage into the main space, the viewer is drawn to Lisa Sammut’s Radical Sign. A large triangular canvas, freestanding in the gallery, projected with moving images of clouds moving in relation to one and other. The cloud forms, manipulated by the artist, overlap and transition unnaturally.
Throughout Supernatural Light Affinity, the artists seek a description of the unknown and the intangible. Yvette Hamilton’s series of work capture the unphotographable presence of a dead star. The series, presented as an installation in a space defined by black curtains draped over the wall, includes two framed photographic lumen prints and the video work, DARK STAR_Scan, presented on one surface of a black box at an angle to the curtain clad wall. The video shimmers with the luminous shifting blues that sketch the black hole’s form.
The exhibition, finally presented after the stops and starts of 2020, is a gentle celebration of the physical experience of art. The material relationships between the works — the play of light and shade across the gallery, the balanced connections between one wall and the next — are more keenly felt in the context of their absence in digital galleries. So, too, are the subtleties of the works themselves: the dimpled texture of velveteen, the drape of fabric, the way glitter catches the light, and the physical experience of scale. This review only sketches the outline of Supernatural Light Affinity, an exhibition that has to be felt.
- Saskia Scott
Left to right: Yvette Hamilton, Dark_Star_1 (detail), 2020; Lisa Sammut, Radial Sign (installation detail), 2021; Helen Shelley, Our Late Loved Ones (detail), 2016; Ali Noble, Own Alphabet for Love, 2020.