Merrin Eirth - I Swallowed a Fly (Comedy of the Humours)

Wednesday 4 - Sunday 22 December 2024

Click here for artwork by Merrin Eirth

My new paintings bite-off plenty to chew and apparently I swallowed a fly in the process. There’s one in the ointment as well.

This exhibition is inspired by multiple narratives about the human predicament and how it tests our resilience: the Marcel Marceau story; the Chinese tale of the Cut Sleeve and the Bitten Peach; Dylan/Hendrix The Joker and the Thief;  Puccini's Madame Butterfly: Catch 22; my dad’s ‘coming of age’ sailor story plus a few other well-known anecdotes and adages that have travelled with me over the years.

My pictures are larger now, and as such they present a complex set of exciting new pictorial challenges. Ideas vie with each other in a scaled-up arena that demands a revised painting methodology and therefore further risk-taking on my part. I am the egg woman, the sorcerer’s apprentice, the clown, and Alice, all at once.

Bigger works provide opportunities to imagine being inside the paintings’ other worldliness, applying my whole body to the practice. Meanwhile, perception traverses painterly surfaces, from opaque to transparent, and then, a few moments in the impasto encountering the palpable object. I want to maintain the shallow picture space related to minimalist theatre settings, whilst alluding, at times, to hypothetical depictions of depth. Engagement with the work invites a multifocal experience which is also reinforced by calculated dissolution of both painted matter and painterly illusion. There are airy and/or ephemeral expressions of matter and space, where the presence of form is more speculative. The aim is to reanimate the play of images and to explore unexpected properties of paint itself. Surreal proportions and distorted relationships of scale are orchestrated to privilege abstruse zones in the narrative. Everything is positioned in the oeuvre of absurdist storytelling, as in the serious art of clowning and accomplished comedians. Hereby, the prickly triumvirate of motivation, methodology and meaning collaborate at the edge of ambiguity.

There are clowns everywhere. I have one inside me, and so does everyone else. Someone very close to me embraces his philosophical inner clown to navigate serious illness with dignity. The degree to which we acknowledge our individual clown and how we organise our intensions for that clown is a personal matter. The fine art of clowning involves an intense, confronting journey into self-reflection and along the way there are inevitably tears to augment laughter. It is no surprise that historically, painters, poets and performers have found affinity with the clown. Among my favourites are Jean-Antoine Watteau, Ethel Wright, Paul Cezanne and Roni Horn.

I dedicate this series of paintings to my beloved daughter Verity, together forever in the heart of the inner clown.