Planeta Inquietante
Pat Brassington’s most recent works have an uncanny familiarity. The furnishings are decidedly of a past era, strangely molded and far from timeless, the strange detachable armrest, the red vinyl, we are cast back to a future of strange potentialities, it could almost be Lucille Ball directed by David Cronenberg.
As is often the case in Brassington’s oeuvre, the bodies she depicts are distended, truncated and dramatically traumatized. The suggestions of intimacy here, of sexual discovery, are muted by her colouration, often the ghastly beige of ’50s interiors. When the colours are bolder, as in Inquietante with its garish blood-red, there remains a coolness, a plasticated gloss.
In some respects these images recall the muted nostalgia of John Brack’s figures. Like Brack there is little regard for realism despite, in Brassington’s case, the photographic source material. In Inquietante what at first glance we take as arms and hands are in fact unnaturally elongated legs and feet – holding hands has never suggested such a macabre intimacy. And, again like Brack, the texture of carpet in the Night Train series draws us into the picture frame, the detail hinting at the unseen detritus of old carpet – dust, dandruff, hair follicles and grit.
‘Inquietante’ is Spanish for ‘disquieting’ and a more apt title is impossible to imagine. A part of what makes this series of works particularly unsettling is Brassington’s subject matter. In the past her work has featured predominantly feminine figures, but here the masculine has entered her world. In Night Train we view hairy legs, a glimpse of testicle. But the sexuality is obscured, the ‘action’ edited out of the picture frame. A naked figure stands by a bed in what could be an anonymous hotel room, the stillness of the image suggesting the prelude of some bizarre or potent act. Indeed, here Brassington seems to be recording a moment in time before or just after some potentially heinous act, perversely refusing to finalise the narrative. “I don’t deliberately set out to tell a story,” she has claimed in the past. “But sometimes when I am working away at an image I can sense a narrative emerging.” *
Night Train is the title of atmospheric piece of rhythm and blues music first recorded by Duke Ellington sideman Johnny Hodges in 1940. It is a piece of music that would work wonderfully as a soundtrack to a gritty noir film and, in the strange sense of dance she evokes in this series, it would accompany Brassington’s Night Train impeccably.
But things get even stranger when we cross the train tracks and find ourselves in a house on Cambridge Road.
What occurs in this ‘home’ beggars belief. It is the nightmare stuff of a teenager of dark leanings, of a hyper-active imagination let loose on an unsuspecting world.
In the earliest days of photography the world was embroiled in periodic moments of horror. Such events as the American Civil War, World War I and the influenza epidemic brought loss of life and grief on a massive scale. Whether it began as flagrant opportunism or a simple glitch in technology, a side-line in formal portraiture was that of ‘spirit photography’ in which photographic portraits revealed the ghost figures, spirit writing and ectoplasm that were crowding the living subjects. It was a craze that swept the Western world from the 1870s to the 1930s. For those who were grieving, spirit photography offered the potential to contact departed loved ones.
But such images are rarely reassuring. Indeed, they are downright creepy. Brassington’s Cambridge Road series straddles a strange divide between spirit and crime photography. In their own way these are the most deeply disturbing works Brassington has assailed us with to date. There is a very weird sense that, unlike the overt surrealist tropes of much of her work, these are ‘documentary’ photographs.
Strange mists float across the scenes. A child lies unconscious upon a chair, a booted figure vomits ectoplasm, a coat-hanger dangles, strangely ominous. There are odd shadows everywhere. Each room of this house on Cambridge Street has its secrets.
“Year’s ago I read Freud’s Totem and Taboo. If I think about it, it must have been a catalyst for me in some ways,” Brassington says. “It was Freud’s musings on ‘the unconscious’ and the ‘return of the repressed’ that fuelled my desire to probe into some aspects of surrealist practice. The ‘fascination’ is still with me. It’s not that I want to travel down the same road but it is a lantern in the window.”**
But a lantern in the window in the dark, at night, is a friendly, beckoning thing. The lantern in the window on Cambridge Road may well attract visitors seeking refuge, but as the door is opened by a strangely bulbous woman, something hidden in her hand, it may well feel that the dark was safer.
