Olivia Lennon: Outer Spaces

Outer Spaces at BBA Gallery is an overview of Olivia Lennon’s exploration into the cosmos. The exhibition is compiled of varied watercolour paintings, labour-intensively painted by hand with fine sable brushes, specialist interference watercolours with an exactitude that resembles digital printing. These artworks are informed by intensive research, inspired by the artist’s natural curiosity with historical ideas and philosophical concepts, which she then translates into meticulous opalescent illustrations. Whether navigating interstellar spaces, mapping the crossing of geographical borders or visualising the invisible flow of microscopic miasmas, Lennon’s work establishes new perspectives of space on a macro- as well as on a microscopic level.

Border stone

By geographical accident, the majority of the marble quarried in Europe comes from those same areas along the E.U’s Mediterranean border (the most deadly border in the world) where unknown numbers of people have attempted to flee war, famine and persecution in Africa and the Middle East. This series of watercolour paintings critiques contemporary European external border practices through the combination of work titles and visual signifiers of obstruction, identity, fascist aesthetics and surveillance. ‘Borderstone’ depicts barricades of marble - the literal ‘stuff-of-this-place’- constructed in order to obstruct the entry of those who are seen as ‘not-of-this-place’.

Since Greco-Roman times marble sculpture has been a signifier of European cultural history and identity, and in antiquity the marble was mined from quarries by slave labourers to build palaces and the statues of empires. In the enlightenment period antique statues became increasingly associated with ideas of race science, not least because the varied skin tone pigments on ancient marble figurative sculptures had worn away.

This later culminated in the 20th C. fascist regimes’ architectural and artistic expressions of racial purity and supremacy in the form white toned marble figures. The fact that some refugee camps are situated in marble quarries, where the mourning-work of hewing gravestones takes place, deepens this relationship further. In using the language of marble, ‘Borderstone' loosely references these ideas as being the ideological kernel behind the increasingly inhumane treatment of mostly brown asylum seekers long Europes southern border. The title of each work raises questions around perceptions of the ‘other’, opaque bureaucratic structures, the right to citizenship, militarised borders, the nature of memorialisation, and the E.U.’s intention to construct a completely impervious border.

Night Air

Stemming from research into our former understanding of airborne disease, ‘Night Air’ presents an imagined topography of dangerous air. The title is borrowed from the outmoded belief that air at night releases deadly miasmas causing cholera, typhoid, malaria, influenza and pneumonic plague.

The base image for each work is printed using the Japanese suminagashi technique. Ink and oxgall are floated on the surface of water, and gently blown, from which the print on paper is pulled. Curlicues of ink are painted over in colour shifting watercolours, and mirrored vertically to create symmetrical designs reminiscent of both body parts and tendrils of poisonous air polluting a space.

The works are displayed in frames modified to resemble fresh lead solder. Two of the paintings, ‘Gnasher’ and ‘Poison Eater’ have necklaces of upper or lower teeth hung from the bottom edge of frames. The inferred mandible hangs loose, the mouth is open, allowing pneumas and miasmas to permeate the boundary between the interior of the breather and the exterior, and back again. ‘Night Air’ makes the invisible threat visible - we are in danger, and ourselves, dangerous.