Orkney Museum, Kirkwall, until 28 October 2006

'She erupted through the trees' by Sheena Graham-George. (photo - Rik Hammond)

IF YOU ARE planning to visit this exhibition – and I would certainly recommend that you do – make sure that you have plenty of time. This is a show that requires the viewer to invest concentration, imagination and thought. As the show took a long time to create, within a very structured set of parameters, so does the viewing of it.

Sheena Graham-George and Jen Townsend met in the USA whilst they were both at Grad School. They were studying the very different disciplines of painting and metalwork jewellery, but the seeds of a plan to collaborate were sewn, and five years later ‘The Exquisite Corpse’ is the very strong result.

Based on a technique invented by the Surrealists in 1925, ‘Exquisite Corpse’, more commonly known as the game ‘Consequences’, is a method by which a collection of words or images are collectively assembled, the result being known as the exquisite corpse.

Each collaborator adds to the composition in sequence and is only allowed to see the end of what the previous person has contributed. This is how Jen and Sheena have created this story, this fairytale, on a rigid timetable of creating one link in the chain, one piece of the story, every month for two years.

A very brave idea, and the exhibition was pencilled in to the Orkney Museum’s temporary exhibition programme before Jen and Sheena had embarked on the ‘game’. Neither saw anything of the other’s work (apart from a line of text and a fragment of image) until Jen arrived from the United States a week before the exhibition was due to open.

Their conviction that the work would hang together and make an exhibition has been borne out, and the result is fascinating.

The story is one primarily of a woman on a dream-like journey which begins in a maze, and several other characters impact, such as the Origami Man and the Moth Man.

These inventions have enabled the creation of incredibly potent imagery which quietly repeats in subtley different ways throughout the exhibition. Paper boats are manipulated into paper cranes, strong yet fragile, as are the moths, pinned like a museum exhibit, but if viewed in the reflective glass of the ‘tank’ they are in, they still fly.

Interspersed by the text, Sheena has created delicate, thoughtful, beautiful and powerful canvases for this exhibition, which sit perfectly alongside the exquisite jewellery and sculptural pieces that Jen carried with her so carefully from the States.

Certain of the images have stayed with me days after visiting the exhibition. A tall fragile ladder up to a tall, spindly but comfortable bed. The strength in repetition through the images of cranes, boats and moths, the malevolence of a man in a Morris Minor, and the disorientation of the maze.

Fate has lent a hand too, with the introduction – totally unplanned – of a snail, making it’s shiny-trailed journey across cloth, as we take our journey with Sheena and Jen, one step at a time.

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Their conviction that the work would hang together and make an exhibition has been borne out, and the result is fascinating.

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The rigid structure imposed by the collaborators on their own journey, and therefore on the final presentation of the work, could have overpowered everything else and left them with an exhibition too interested in its production to be visually and artistically interesting.

The artworks could have simply become illustrations to the story and therefore lost their own strength and vitality, and the viewer could decide not to accept the makers’ directions on how to view the exhibition – not to read the text, or to view arbitrarily.

None of these things have happened. The structure has added strength, and enabled a powerful aesthetic, the artworks add value to the story and change it as equals with the words, and at the Preview for this show, I watched many people silently walk from text to piece to text. They were choosing to engage with the story, the imagery and the potency of ‘The Exquisite Corpse’.

On a different note, and as a separate comment, I am struck also through this exhibition, by the coincidence and parallels currently taking place in the art world in Orkney.

A mile or so away from Orkney Museum, at Papdale Primary School, artists in residence Christil Trumpet, are two artists working collaboratively, using the theme of the game ‘consequences’. Two completely different collaborations creating completely different but equally strong and fascinating work.

There are other themes too being tackled currently by collaborative artists in Orkney, and artists working powerfully in text and image. This show is a demonstration of the good and strong work being undertaken in these areas of visual and written art. Invest some time to visit the exhibition before it hopefully tours to the other geographic partner in the collaboration – the United States.

(The exhibition runs at the Orkney Museum in Kirkwall until the 28th October. The Museum is open from Monday – Saturday, 10.30 am – 12.30 pm, 1.30 pm – 5.00 pm, admission free)

© Clare Gee, 2006