Persy Russell responds to 'Chimera'

“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.”

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

The object of the wall is to separate, cleave things apart. To create borders and boundaries. Walls allow for an I and a You to exist, placed gently upon either side. That first line in the sand is the primary trauma that informs all that succeeds it. In the liminal spaces between those edgeless delineations languishes something. Language,  made up of walls, which is to say definitions. Definition is both necessary to achieve Chimera and antithetical to its very nature. 

Chimaera - a fire-breathing female beast with a lion’s head, goat’s body and a serpent’s tail

Chimeric - an organism containing multiple different genetic tissues.

Chimer - a bellringer,

Chimera refers to a beast, an idea, or perhaps an organism synthesised from more than one source. It becomes undefinable inhabiting multiple realms. We can see this in the exhibition - like the lamb, a symbol of purity and religiosity it is rendered abject and material, encrusted in the detritus of birth. The chimeric has permeated these walls. It clings to ideas like a dank musk. These opposing forces dissolve under fermenting ambiguous pressure. Definitions and iconographies disturbed,  as that which has come to define them starts to bleed across boundaries. Ultimately a betrayal of identity & order.

         A two-faced wall.    

______________

A response to Nashashibi/Skaer's exhibition Chimera at Cooper Gallery, 30 September – 10 December 2022.

Persy Russell is an artist, and final year DJCAD Art and Philosophy student. Visit their website: persythepoet.wordpress.com

Image: Lucy Skaer, Haystacks made of Garnet, Garnets made of Hay, 2022.
Bronze and pigment, pigment on paper (installation detail). Photo by Sally Jubb.