- May 19
by James Dyer
Two models are variously splayed and stacked in a small, Paris hotel room. They are staged in Trees Heil’s distinct style that fuses adolescent dress-up with complex eroticism. The room interior is sparsely furnished, like a make-do doll’s house; bed, lamp, side chair.
Despite the bare flesh, silken underwear, and close gentle contact, the models in Room 01 are palpably asexual. There is no suggestion that they desire each other, savour the gaze of the lens, or the eye of the photographer. But they seem chronically aware of the ways they are exposed to these angles of sight; they guard their faces behind hair, a hand, they push themselves into the bedsheets. This timid self-consciousness, along with the harsh lighting and the awkward orientation of the camera, give the photographs a look of private, softcore polaroid snaps. What the models convey is stilted, vulnerable but ultimately trusting. Further, the way they are unflatteringly dressed feels like the work of an amateur director with an image in mind; veiled behind their recording device whilst in front their erotic vision is fumbled into form.
The models’ clothes are a half-worn mismatch of things frumpy, sheer, and furry, from the packet-fresh blue calf-length stockings to the knee-high polished black leather boots. Heil, it seems, gives shape to a fantasy that comes as awkwardly to her as it does her models, there is, as such, something sincere at play here. At a few steps removed from the room, the hotel, the city of love, it’s increasingly clear that the pallid fantasy held in Room 01 is an urge for spectacle.
This series of photographs contrasts Sophie Calle’s 1981 series, The Hotel. Working as a chambermaid in Venice, Calle would search through guests’ belongings, read their diaries, and sift through their bins, taking photographs as she went. Typical of Calle, this was an obsessive kind of investigative portrait photography. The developed images gained their authenticity through the absence of the sitter. In Room 01, by contrast, Heil’s artful obsession is evident in the barefaced construction of the bedroom scenario.
There is, however, still an authenticity in Heil’s photographs. It comes from the inevitable shortcomings of the models, in their ultimate inability to truly occupy, to invade and actualise, that uncertain vision being urged into focus. That is to say, a true fantasy is most efficacious when it retains an indefinite shape, a less-than-tangible form, it is best kept as a feeling, a hazy intuition. Once it is actualised and made specific in action, words, or in image, for instance, it loses some of that necessarily uncertain quality that made it so alluring in the first place.
When Calle peeked and peered, she was drawn to the chance, the accident, the lucky find. By contrast, it is the constructed, the spectacle of the incident itself, not the accidental, that Heil stands over in Room 01. Heil observed that, “of course the room is staged, but it is also utterly real; in an absolute sense, in front of me there are two people laid on top of each other, but this is only one of many other possible ways of seeing what is happening in the room, I just happen to enjoy being physical with people in a way like how animals play with each other’s bodies.”
This is a break from Heil’s usual style that makes the absurdly artificial appear as if it were routine, natural. Here, in Room 01, the scene is forcefully synthetic. Any naturalness of the image is only recognisable once we look through the artistry of the mise en scène to see the scene for what it is. As mundane as that might be, there is something vulnerable at its core and from this point of view, the location, costumes, and poses take on a peculiar uncanniness. It is a traceable fault line running through the entire series that cleaves what is actually going on from the fuzzy designs of fantasy.
In one photograph, the models look almost like mannequins temporarily propped against each other in an upright pose waiting to later be set right and adjusted to take on a more human-like stance. In another, the models’ legs and arms are stiffly interlocked with each other on a chair. It’s a naive, sexless intercourse. What stops all this from appearing too doll-like, though, is a hand softly held in brunette curls, the elastic squeeze of underwear into dimpling flesh, and the distinct sense that each pose is fallible, needing to be kept up, maintained, endured.
There is something in the way Ebba van Beek styled Heil’s models that traces back to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s carnal Paris of dancers and sex workers. It’s there in the flowing layers of fabric, dynamic, loose, translucent, and the fluff, frump, and ruff of the thick, off-coloured faux-fur. As a painter of modern life as he lived it, Toulouse-Lautrec offered an uninhibited reach behind the doors of brothels. His 1896 work Seule (Alone) figures a limp sex worker in black stockings hanging over the edge of an unmade bed. It looks like a comfortably familiar scene for the painter; grim but with a tender warmth. Conversely, the bed Heil photographs remains made and the models lumped on top of it seem bloodless. As such, where there was once a dilemma of hedonistic jouissance there is now a despondent, desiccated try at meaningful connection.
Also in Paris' shadowy rooms, in Henri Barbusse’s 1908 novel L'Enfer (Hell) the protagonist is a new guest in an old hotel. One evening he notices the light from the room next door being cast into the darkness of his room through a hole in the wall. Much like a photographer, he moves his eye in line with the hole. From there, at a distance as thick as a few rotten planks, bricks and plaster, he imagines the stories of the neighbouring occupants. The protagonist of L'Enfer is a voyeur, what he sees is laced with the tastes of his imagination. As such, the lives of the people next door retain an excess that exists beyond what can be seen through the sketchy viewfinder. Ultimately, the protagonist’s relationship to his neighbours insists on him being obscured from view, breathing lightly, peeking. Heil, on the other hand, is not immediately a voyeur because she is oppressively present in the room, she steps through the viewfinder to direct her models. What they are and what they can become, as such, is the result of how Heil postures them in failing forms with uncertain purpose. Fittingly, Heil shows me a 1988 painting by Marlene Dumas, Waiting (for meaning), that partly inspired Room 01, its strewn form echoes Toulouse-Lautrec’s Seule.
Heil’s Room 01 guards against an insipid visual culture that prizes the immediate, the intuitive, sameness, the readily-known. She does this in a few ways, most notably by emphasising discontinuity – primarily between what is unreal in fantasy and what is made real in lived life – she also makes tangible a sense of deliberation in a medium best known for its instantaneity and she gives narrative shape to a gut-level excitement for the oddity of ambiguity. All this extends beyond what is inherently false in photography, its partiality of frame, insistence on fixity, and openness to interpretation. There is no afterglow in Room 01, instead we are left with the raw obscenity of communication, it’s a numb and lonely feeling.
Photography credits:
Room 01 Photography by Trees Heil
Styling Ebba van Beek
Trees Heil: https://www.treesheil.com/
by Derek Horton
These observations and speculations resulted from a visit to Simon Le Ruez’s temporary public studio during his residency in Sheffield in Autumn 2024. The site of the residency is a ground floor space with high ceilings, and large windows, which overlook the street outside whilst simultaneously allowing passers-by an uninterrupted view of the activity within. This hybrid space that is neither gallery nor studio, or from another perspective, both, means that the normally isolated and private activities of thinking, researching, experimenting and making are revealed to anyone who cares to look in. Meanwhile, the ongoing ‘exhibition’ is constantly in flux, as new elements are added and previous ones adapted, and the spatial relationships between them shift as they are moved and rearranged. The workspace becomes a stage-set around which the artist moves, conscious (or not) of his actions becoming a performance for an audience, who might merely cast a passing glance, or be sufficiently curious to enter and engage. Architecture, and relationships between interior and exterior space, the built and the natural world, the permanent and the temporary, are longstanding and pervasive interests for Le Ruez in his work, making this situation a particularly appropriate and productive one for further material exploration of these conceptual concerns.
The idea of making art as action or performance within an architectural space, and of viewing art as involving a navigation of that space, invites a consideration of choreography, which is essentially the melding of space and time through movement. Le Ruez is sensitive to the spatial relationship of individual components of his work to each other and to the whole room, and has created simple structural interventions that disrupt or direct the flow of movement around and between the works. In the context of this space, he sets up an even more complex relationship to the world beyond, as seen through the window, and one senses a playfulness in how all these overlapping relationships are choreographed. Body, landscape, and architecture become mutually transmutable, equivalent elements in a performative animation of the space. The multiplicity of possible viewpoints and the ways in which the perception of any one object is contextualised by the other objects or the empty space that surround it are important aspects of the overall visual impact of this work. Its qualities derive not so much from the things themselves, but from their relationship to the ‘in-between’ space that surrounds them. Especially because of the large windows, these surroundings extend beyond the finiteness of the room and into the infinity of the space beyond. Artwork, interior architecture, street, buildings, skyline, sky––all co-exist and shift in and out of focus as they contextualise each other in the totality of our experience. Le Ruez’s awareness of this is evident in the way he is consciously staging the immediate surroundings of the artwork and choreographing our view of them within their wider setting. Making the works, it could be said, partly involves creating the surroundings within which they come into existence, materialising the dynamic tensions inherent in this relationship. As Max Kozloff proposed, albeit in a different context, “art is a non-agreement of part with whole, a communion of dissimilarities and discords” [1].
Redirecting our focus to the 70-or-so square meters of Le Ruez’s workspace for this residency, his placement of objects and structures at various stages of completion within the space draws attention to its volumetric dimensions. Several narrow columns are a feature of the existing architecture, acting as a bridge between floor and ceiling that is further emphasised by linear constructions the artist has rigged up using wool, string, and rope. Timber-framed screens, variously left open or filled in with opaque or semi-transparent plastic sheets, form moveable barriers and entry points that function as temporary enclosures and create rooms within rooms. Objects are fixed to walls or stand on a variety of horizontal surfaces that function as platforms, whilst others are scattered around the floor, propped against walls, or suspended at varying heights from the ceiling. There is something approachable and seductive about the sculptural objects, painted surfaces, and photographs, that are presented here in ways that emphasise their inter-relationship. Often small, unassuming and intimate, close together but not touching, positioned within a wider fragmented architecture, they evoke intimacy, eroticism, and psychological tension.
Despite a meticulous attention to detail in the making, there is a sense that everything here is in flux, that these are provisional works in a provisional space, made with a sense of freedom, improvisation and playfulness. Any shape on a flat plane or in a three-dimensional space creates another shape around it, so the placing of objects can be seen as not so much the division of space as the creation of more shapes. The traditional sense of positive and negative space in a figure-ground relationship is thereby reconfigured as a relationship between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ shape, in which the ‘passive’ surrounding shape itself becomes an equally active element.
Instead of [a] universe of “signification” (psychological, social, functional), we must try to construct a world both more solid and more immediate. Let it be first of all by their presence that objects and gestures impose themselves. To describe things, in point of fact, requires that we place ourselves deliberately outside them. We must neither appropriate them to ourselves nor transfer anything to them [2].
Alain Robbe-Grillet
With the exception of a few photographs, film stills, and collaged images, the objects here are rigorously non-representational; distinctly solid, they undoubtedly impose themselves by their presence. Whether natural or industrial materials, found, reclaimed, or carefully made and skillfully crafted, from hand-blown glass to paper clips, they are assertively what they are; yet nonetheless they challenge Robbe-Grillet’s injunction against signification and lead us perhaps to question the very ‘abstractness’ of abstraction. They signify. They signify, despite themselves, and irrespective of the artist’s intentions. We bring psychological, emotional, and social readings to them. Our personal reference points might be biology, architecture, sexuality, cinema, landscape, or whatever else, but our perception of the work is filtered through such individually determined engagement with it. The role of colour in this is an important one. Colour is intrinsic to, inseparable from these objects; the intense materiality of colour in the work simultaneously evoking emotional resonances and emphasising their sheer physical presence, their ‘object-ness’.
Light is, of course, central to our perception of colour, and it also plays an important part in its own right in the work Le Ruez has developed during this residency. As well as the way objects are lit, both by artificial electric light and the natural light provided by the large windows, some of the sculptural forms serve as light sources themselves, or provide coloured filters altering the atmosphere of different areas of the space. This serves to emphasise the aspects already discussed here, of territory, transparency, and transition; the ambiguous interface between interior and exterior, private and public. These in-between spaces that surround us in both the natural and the built environment are recreated in Le Ruez’s installations with their evocation of movement and change, and slippage between the permanent and the temporary, the fixed and the fragile.
The screen is another such interface, and Le Ruez has often acknowledged that cinema is a recurring inspiration and reference point within his work. Apart from a small number of film stills (from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas), some integrated into sculptural elements of the installation, others just pinned to the wall, this cinematic influence is not immediately apparent. Its real significance is a metaphorical one, revealed through the relationship of space and time. Movies, whatever their genre, are sequential compositions in which a series of incidents occur between a distinct beginning and end. Sometimes these occur in ‘real time’, whilst sometimes days, weeks or even decades are distilled into the film’s actual duration of two hours or so. These separations of time are analogous to the ways in which the visual and sculptural elements of Le Ruez’s installations are separated by space but form coherent parts of a whole scenario that is contained within a circumscribed overall space. Tension and suspense is created by the precisely spaced gaps between objects and shifts in their scale, or by the precariousness of their positioning. We are drawn into a web of sensations and possible meanings as we progress through this filmic flow of images; our imagination is provoked and ideas are generated that might transport us elsewhere whilst remaining located in the here and now.
This way of viewing Le Ruez’s work echoes the playful and almost childlike inquisitiveness that characterises his making of it. His is a process of material enquiry and experimentation informed by meticulous skill and an attention to detail that is knowingly undercut by a casual willingness for things to be unmade, unfixed and unfinished. His playfulness is grounded securely though, in a considered and informed sense of aesthetics, whilst intellectually wide-ranging interests and references are the source of his confidence to embrace risk and uncertainty, in a dialogue between objects that transcends space, time and scale in a celebration of colour, form and material.
NOTES
[1] Max Kozloff, The Inert and the Frenetic, a lecture given at Bennington College, Vermont, on November 29, 1965.
[2] Alain Robbe-Grillet, quoted from Richard Ellman and Charles Feidelson Jr. [eds.] The Modern Tradition, 1965, Oxford University Press (p. 364)
by Gertrude Gibbons
Daria Coleridge's ceramic sculptures create internal dialogues. With forms that appear to furl and fold in on themselves, they evoke familiar shapes from nature: newly budding leaves, curled petals, ripples on a lake. These internal dialogues invite the viewer to closely observe the object, and in this way also appear to open themselves up for the viewer, creating a sense of optimistic openness.
Coleridge's emphasis, in her own words, is on "capturing movement". She has described to me the indirect influences of dance and music on her work. She notes an example of an interaction between art forms which made a particular impression on her: early in her career, whilst studying a sculpture diploma at Heatherley School of Fine Art, there was a brief to respond to Laban Dancers with sketches and ultimately sculptures, whilst they, as Coleridge recounts, "rotated and held positions, quick, quick, slow". The dancers in turn worked from the sketches responding with a spontaneous dance. This engaged Coleridge in the dynamic potential of collaborative exchange between art forms. Her description of the dance shows her attention to the sense of time and rhythm of this dancing.
Exuberant Mulberry (2024) shows a piece in a sensitive and dynamic shade of magenta, with a coiling shape upwards and outwards resembling the peel of a carefully prepared apple. The colour seems to move or spin with the shape in waves and ripples. Inevitably, this play with colour and form is given further play in the way light in any space will reflect on the glazed surface. This play is interrupted by the lines, which start almost in the imitation of a crack and rise upwards, broadening the gaps, as though freeing itself of gravity and solid form. There feels to me a connection also to painting, perhaps the shapes made as Lucio Fontana cuts through the canvas; it seems in some ways a gesture in clay to canvas. As such, it evokes natural forms but is also an independent object, openly gesturing towards its material nature and process of making.
Observing the creation of space and shape through movement and shifts in time appears a key point in Coleridge's practice. As dancers create illusions of shifting time and altered space, so ceramics might both capture and evoke these sensations too. Within Coleridge's pieces, the idea of rotation is especially important. Folding in, folding out. Circling in, circling out. She explains that as she strove for a "more fluid spontaneous abstraction, I delved into a period of creating rotating forms, trembling ruffles and undulating shapes in ceramics". Looking at the pieces, I feel an air of tension waiting for the enclosed space of the object to be thrown open; for the outside shell to be unfurled out and away from itself and reveal an interior space or offer its arm to the viewer in an invitation to dance.
Coleridge's early work was on bronze commissions of heads of children and dogs, capturing happy ephemeral moments such as small whisperings in an ear or exuberant laughter. This previous work with faces and expression is evident in the new work the artist makes today. Although she no longer works with heads, there is still an influence and implication of the human form. The ceramic sculptures at times bear resemblances to the shape of a human figure, and at other times a glimpse suggests the movement of hair behind an ear, interlaced fingers, embracing arms. In this way, I'm reminded of pieces by Barbara Hepworth, work which I think also shares with Coleridge a sense of awaited sound or voice for the silent object.
Coleridge is interested in the absorption of influences, their ingestion, digestion and how they come to be channelled through each individual in complex ways. She notes particularly the influence on the colour glazes she uses, influenced by the painter Clifford Still, glass-maker Fulvio Bianconi, jeweller Georg Jensen and artist James Turrell. These points of inspiration are not only the images of past artworks, objects, buildings, but also words spoken by family, friends, acquaintances. In particular, through her American-Italian heritage, the presence of art and design references from these landscapes are especially present; the photodynamism of the Italian futurists, and the work of Umberto Boccioni echo forward in her work. Her interest lies in the distinctiveness of the individual person, and how they interact with the intricate web of people, objects and world around them. The uniqueness, she tells me, "is what illuminates the individual as we interact and respond to each other like a dance". Her ceramic forms reflect on this, each unique objects that reflect something of individual existence and its interaction, in the manner of a dance, with those around them.
There is a perceptive contemplation between motion and stillness, the liquid and the solid, highlighted through the evocation of seascapes and rockfaces, water, wind, plants and stone. The naming of the works is an important part of Coleridge's creative process and the sculptures' coming into being. The pieces High Tide (2024) and Fly High (2024) have swirling forms that, as the title suggests, recall sails in the wind, also like furling leaves, whilst the colours are similar to different forms of canvas, stone or lichen. The naturally occurring irregularities in the colour bring life to the surface, suggesting molten and effervescing movement. Arctic Breeze (2024) responds to the Alps where the sharp rock face meets the soft snow; which, perhaps depending on one's mood, or how a viewer chooses to dialogue with the work, could also resemble another sculptural ceramic seascape, with the leaf-like forms playing about the surface of the sculpture like plants below the surface of the water. Blue Metallic Akimbo (2025) also evokes the sea in a different way, where the colours appear to drip or stream down the side of the object, as though enclosed by the glaze; or as though ink has been left to run in streams through clear water, and this object is a frozen creation of water, capturing a moment of mixing forms.
Coleridge has explained her work process to me; the initial sketch of three-dimensional ideas, before working up to scale, striving for a fluid shape in porcelain or clay and looking for light and airy structures, sensations of the translucence, with the chance to look through. Following this, she describes a "moment to abandon structural concentration and fly into a spontaneous action to awaken it to life and react to it afresh". Colour and the application of the glaze is an important part of the creative process, with one preferred method of the artist's being to pour on glaze on a turntable in order to give a spontaneous effect. Part of the excitement is the for the unknown: the surprise of the colour after the firing. This suggests an exchange between the artist and the material, creating a dialogue whereby the two respond to one another.
One thing I've remembered repeatedly from our conversations and I feel resonates in looking at these objects, is the idea of singing and paying attention to the details of one's own voice, the colour and tone of the sound from within. That exchange from the inside out, and the outside in, and how this provokes the telling of stories and memories. These ceramic sculptures are very human, speaking of interaction with nature, people and the space around them. They offer a dialogue and, in their elements of spontaneity and surprise, they comment on their material process of making, capturing their coming into being as a reflection on metamorphosis.
Open studio talk: As part of London Craft Week, Daria Coleridge will be in conversation with Gertrude Gibbons on 13th May at 4:30pm at 54 Ovington Street, SW3 2JB. Find out more: https://londoncraftweek.com/events/ceramic-sculpture-open-studio-and-exhibition/
Images courtesy the artist