JAME ST FINDLAY
LIFE SPAN
26 APR – 1 JUN 2024
Jame St Findlay (b.1994, Scotland) uses the buoy as a sculptural refrain in the series of glazed earthenware vessels at the heart of Life Span. For the artist, the shape is almost incidental, though it contributes to the tendency of the works to speak of foreshores and things set adrift, abraded by silt and brackish water. Their suspension over makeshift pools filled with river water gives form to the primordial impulse to wish into wells; viewed in series, they remind us that the practical functioning of buoys can be talismanic - like magic charms, they signal, protect and preserve.
The surfaces of the sculptures are encrusted with decals and etched marks that melt together to become the detritus of a psychic landscape. Images drawn from stock photography, branding and other pieces of media glimpsed in transit heap and drift beneath bubbling glaze: Joni Mitchell song lyrics appear alongside BT’s old ‘piper’ logo, while lines of scrawled text are crossed out, re-written, trailing off into obscurity.
Moments of familiarity indulge our instinctive urge to decipher, to make a string of symbols into meaning where there is no singular thread to be found. Rather than offering any coherent narrative, the vessels act as carriers, picking up the ambient after-images of a mind in motion and preserving them. Like a Bellarmine jug or a witch-bottle, we can imagine these being dredged up by the mudlarkers of the future - miraculously whole - and examined as the mysterious remnants of defunct belief systems.
A tone of indeterminate longing shifts in and out of focus throughout the installation: a text bubble reads ‘ask me what I’m doing with my life,’ alongside the words ‘together forever’; images show couples kissing and fighting, alongside a solitary figure, hunched with a drooping head. These images are stock photographs, transformed by St Findlay from corporatised iconography of love and romance into ghostly silhouettes evocative of eighteenth century shadow portraits. Archetypes of the heterosexual imaginary reappear throughout Life Span: men with briefcases, women with babies, couples facing each other in opposition and encircled by love-hearts.
Based in London, Jame St Findlay works across sculpture, film, performance and photography. St Findlay is currently completing their final year at Royal Academy Schools; their moving image work Death Knell (2022) is being shown at Camden Arts Centre as part of the 2023 Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Solo exhibitions of their work include Lone, 2023 at Luca’s Gallery, London; Conditional Love, 2022 at Middlesex Presents, London and Low Hanging Fruit, 2022 at Celine Gallery, Glasgow.
