LAMPSHADES or BUTTERFLIES… Angela Eames

 

Matryoshka, one of Eames’ ‘infinivids’, features a blue-and-white Russian doll clad in alternating floral and geometric repeat patterns, derived from Gzhel ceramics. The object floats in a depthless black space as silent as the outer reaches of the universe. In a slow, smooth operation, the doll opens and closes like a gaping mouth or a cyclopean eye, revealing a section through its interior anatomy. Its internal layers evoke not so much fertility as the rings of a tree stump, counting lost years. On each turn another layer of the doll is peeled away to reveal the skin below, with its new pattern, a subtle variation on the old. The work is part design classic, part decorative pattern book overlaid with nostalgia for childhood games. As it sheds each successive skin, the doll slowly reduces in size, its interior emptying into a black hole, the rings of time having run out. The secret at its core is no more than the nothingness of the space in which the doll floats, the dark, empty heart of the computer.

 

Eames’ ‘infinivids’ reference the ‘machine vision’ traditions of computer-generated animations exemplified by artists such as William Latham in the 1990s or more recently by Refik Anadol or Fuse. However Eames’ stately pacing and focus on a single domestic artefact in constant motion engenders a quality of attention that digital abstractions rarely command. Her slow, contemplative, drawn images retain the simplicity of eastern ceramic objects and celebrate the Tao of the hand-made traditions from which the images derive. In the Shapeshifter drawings Eames re-imagines familiar domestic props, for instance, the blue-and-white Willow patterned china so popular a generation ago. But here Eames uses the computer to bend, fold and arch the vessels into unexpected configurations. Are the teacups being repurposed as lampshades or are they metamorphosing into butterflies? These remodelled objects retain the beauty of the original but, extracted from their familiar interiors, they unsettle with their refusal of classification. Her teacups drift in a timeless loop, the ‘present continuous’ that for Eames is the temporality of invention, of intelligent inquiry that, for all its rigour, never denies the power of visual pleasure.

 

Catherine Elwes, Oxford, 11 November 2023