Exhibitions
Haunted
Kyla McFarlane
Pat Brassington's photographic 'house' has always been haunted. Her enigmatic images, focussing primarily on domestic, bodily and psychical interiors, are troubled by spectres both seen and suggested. We might describe her work as 'a cage of ghosts', a phrase used by a little known French photographer in the 1890s to describe photographs he had printed from recycled glass plates. Despite his efforts to clean off the previous images, they appeared 'far more clearly' in his new prints, haunting the more recent images.1 This early photographer describes what we would recognise as an accidental double exposure. Yet his description of the image as a cage in which a photographic memory is both contained and revealed also alludes to the notion of the photograph as a space for the return of that which is repressed – haunted by a history built by its maker.
Brassington's images hold the past in similar ways. Her practice of photographic collage, which first employed analogue and now digital means, draws from her own oeuvre as a visual memory bank. As if driven by a persistent case of repetition-compulsion, past images and fragments of images are constantly thrown up by the artist and reconfigured into new works. Imagery that might otherwise be lost to the depths of a hazy memory leaks to the surface of new images, as if welling up from the unconscious. As if returning to open old psychic wounds, Brassington's images depict suffocating maternal realms, uncanny interiors and bodily mutations so abject that they must, we conclude, be called forth from the deep recesses of the unconscious.
In an early series of photographs titled 1 + 1 = 3 (1984), Brassington focussed her photographic gaze on a dull expanse of carpet, a dreary vastness that has become a recurring and cloying presence in her work. Along with similarly observed skirting boards (the dull seam where the edge of a wall meets the floor), old patterned wallpapers, lumpen pillows, the limp edges of curtains, matted old soft toys, Venetian blinds and dead-end corners, she has since employed this as a trope in order to configure and reconfigure a particular photographic space. This visual and conceptual 'cage' reeks of an oppressive dank domesticity, a tight space in which unpleasantly ambiguous acts are alluded to. In this caustic deadened terrain, a dog lying on the floor is presumed dead; a stain on the wall is imagined to be the residue of an unpleasant unwitnessed occurrence.
19th century French novelist Honor Balzac believed that 'all physical bodies are made up entirely of layers of ghostlike images, an infinite number of leaf-like skins laid one on top of the other – every time someone had his photograph taken, one of the spectral layers was removed from the body and transferred to the photograph. Repeated exposures entailed the unavoidable loss of subsequent ghostly layers, that is, the very essence of life.'2
In Untitled I-IX (2002), Brassington's familial subjects 'hide' their identities from the camera; turning to the wall or covering their faces with household objects seemingly grabbed from their immediate environment – a plate, a mirror, a pair of gloves. Despite such improvisational acts of resistance, they are also entrapped: a girl is held too tightly in a blanket's embrace; another is gagged and bound to the wall by sticky tape. As a representation of the playful, yet oppressive and even cruel dynamics of family life, these images are forcefully rendered. Beneath Untitled I–IX there lurks a violent undercurrent, the potential obliteration or entrapment of the subject by photography itself. In this way, these images are haunted by photography's past, as their subjects' performative avoidance of the captive lens both parodies and sanctions Balzac's qualms.
Balzac's fears may seem irrational today, yet it is still possible to feel threatened by photography's ability to expose in other ways, to 'peel away' the layers of the self by laying us bare before the lens. Brassington's awareness of this seems to compel her to abandon the singularity of the lens for the freedoms of montage in order to uncover that which resides deep in the recesses of our psyche.
Like Untitled I–IX, at first glance the mise en scene of Brassington's recent Cambridge Road series appears less obviously altered than many of her other works. This apparent fidelity beguiles us into perceiving it as lived reality rather than a constructed realm embedded in the psychic interior, and encourages us to imagine a relationship between a photographer, a camera and her subjects. Where the subjects of Untitled I–IX inhabit a placeless, anonymous interior, even Cambridge Road's title suggests the particularity of a certain locale, endowing this house with specificity that is absent in previous series.
Yet the uncanny shiver that runs through Brassington's oeuvre still lurks in Cambridge Road's drab interiors. The adult protagonists don masks, rendering their faces comical and frightening. Pushed into the recesses of a room at the end of a sea of worn out linoleum, and accompanied by two women standing before it as if guarding a horrific secret, a cabinet becomes an uncanny object. And we speculate as to why the woman on the right wears a protective mask. Is she warding off the stench of the dead? A wire coathanger lying in the corner of a room is imbued with an uncanny aura, as a potentially murderous weapon, or a catalyst for blind rage towards a daughter, as it was for Joan Crawford's monstrous mother-figure in Mommie Dearest. Lured into these eerie scenarios by a convincingly prosaic mise en scene, we might take a moment to recognise a shadow on the wall as that of a scuba diver. Its presence is inexplicable, but it could easily have escaped the watery realms of a previous work, First Wet (2001). Aberrant moments such as these traverse Cambridge Road, dislodging any comfort we might derive from its banality and pressing the work closely against the shadowy terrain of Brassington's past conversations with the surreal and the monstrous.
The visual tropes of both spirit and crime scene photography also haunt this house. Inert bodies are scattered throughout its rooms, subjects who have apparently met with undignified ends. A woman lies with her head in an oven, another lies in the bath, her face framed by a shower hose. A figure lies face down on a bare floor, suggesting a narrative of murderous intent. If Cambridge Road is a crime scene, however, its associations with more 'fraudulent' photographic modes unravel its forensic possibilities. Even as Brassington alludes to the photograph as evidence, her scattering of visual references to ghostly presences and apparitions, along with other digital and conceptual manipulations of the image, toy with our ability to 'read' the narrative. Mysterious shadowy fluids also drift across these scenes and the head of one protagonist is obliterated by an ectoplasmic blur. In channelling the tropes and trickery of spirit photography, Brassington, too, offers us tangible images of the eminently unrepresentable, whilst revelling in the ambiguity created by her ghostly layers of photographic intent.
1. Leon Wulff, letter to the editor in chief Le Progres Photographique No.4, April 1891, pp62-3. Clement Cheroux discusses the impact of the residual image on spirit photography in 'Ghost Dialectics: Spirit Photography In Entertainment And Belief' A Perfect Medium: Photography And The Occult (eds. Clement Cheroux et al.) Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2005, p45.
2. Balzac’s fears are related here by his contemporary, the photographer Nadar. 'My Life As A Photographer' October: The First Decade (eds. Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, Douglas Crimp and Joan Copjec) MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987, p19. Nadar’s memoir was first published in 1900.