The
tulips at Poppy Sebire are certainly not excitable, despite the bold
spring day streaming into All Hallows from the skylights above. These
tulips are calm, quiet, dank almost. The colours are ochre, pale
lilac, beige and brown, here and there a dab or two of dullish green.
It feels like something of a non-event. A woman artist painting
flowers, photographing and collaging, stitching flowers even,
shocking for all the wrong reasons.
Yet
there's a whispered sense of something else at work here. Nikki de
Saint Phalle haunts the space, although there's nothing of her wacky
exuberant vivacity. Rather there's a listlessness that borders on
painful, a nothingness that's almost too much to bear. I don't want
to linger long. I want to be somewhere else, somewhere brighter, more
alive.
The
title of the exhibition, The Wounded Tulip, comes from a poem by
Sylvia Plath that she wrote in March 1961 whilst in hospital for an
appendix operation and following a miscarriage in February of the
same year. “I didn't want any flowers,” she says in the poem as
she catches sight of their blood redness beside her, “I only wanted
to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.” The flowers
seem threatening to her, reminders of the world outside that she has
temporary respite from. They demand things of her that she is not
able to give. “The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous
animals,” she says.
Georgie
Hopton's tulips hold no such threat and make no such demands. These
tulips are themselves wounded. Perhaps they reflect our own
transience and vulnerability, maybe even our brokeness. We recall
Georgia O'Keeffe and her wildly passionate flower paintings, erotic
and alight with sensuality and movement. All that is present there is
absent here.
Hopton's
flowers, in an anthropomorphic sense, are brittle and dry, uptight
and asexual, frightened almost of their own existence. Or they are
bulbous and heavy, drooping under the weight of their own
portentiousness. They seem sad, dissociated and forgotten, as though
time and life has passed them by. They are old men and women who
missed their chance to sing and dance and laugh and cry and now
prefer to pretend they have missed nothing, to tell themselves
they're happy as they are. They smile a dry, shallow smile. They are
nobody. They have given up their names and their day-clothes to the
nurses. Their history to the anaesthetists and their bodies to the
surgeons. These tulips are not livid red, alive and screaming. They
are the patient, quietly numb, dying a slow sad death from which they
turn tragically away.
Poppy Sebire
Georgie Hopton
The Wounded Tulip
11 May to 16 June 2012
written for Spoonfed
Poppy Sebire
Georgie Hopton
The Wounded Tulip
11 May to 16 June 2012
written for Spoonfed