Exhibition Review: To rest among the blades - Abi Charlesworth Gloam Gallery 04/04/2025 - 26/04/2025

As I sit to write this piece of art criticism I stare into the living room I share with my mother.  It is an uneasy peace in terms of our two styles, I prefer more abstract muted pieces and my mum has bright figurines. Neither of us are sure as to which of them will last the test of time.  These questions seem not to weigh as heavy in the world of art. Neither it nor fashion and ‘culture’ seem overly concerned and contrarily seem happy at the ever increasing climate crisis.  The rise in AI art sales at auction houses such as Christies and Sothebys, water guzzling and energy sapping with every prompt,  counts as one example of an industry built around scarcity and greed. Made an AI doll of yourself?  You’re teaching the algorithm how to identify you.  BP’s reluctant climb down from sponsorship of cultural institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Opera House count as scant victories in a battle for relevance by an industry fearful for its future.  Prior to the increased pressure by lobbyists, scientist and governments they felt that in a world that is burning those with the fuel made the rules.  Those days are ending but putting the fire out takes much more effort than keeping it fed.    

 Take too our wasteful practices towards fast fashion.  ASOS and others apathetically churning out landfill each season for Nike winged narcissists. I hold no grudges with the people buying clothes at a seemingly inexpensive price but the cost to those manufacturing them, often in the form of torrid conditions for minimal pay not to mention the cost to the environment, means the issue is larger than affirmative individual action.  When Gucci becomes a synonym for good in our society the problem is deep routed.  

But what are we to do?  ‘Shut up the words, and seal the book even to the time of the end’?  No.  We need work that speaks of the fatalistic nature of our being.  We know the world is burning yet we all buy things in the hope of one brief moment of respite from this time of endings.  How many of our possessions will outlast us to leave an indelible mark upon generations to come?  How in this last great excess do we make not just art but civilisation? 

It is to this lofty task that Abi Charlesworth sets themself in the work To rest among the blades at Gloam gallery in Sheffield. Here I was able to see the first of two such iterations of this project.  It is a thoughtful reflection upon object, meaning and emotion.  When fatalistic thoughts are reinforced by depression all things of value loose their meaning and become worthless. All means of personal identity and ornamentation are lost in a grey, desolate sludge. Nothing fills the void.  I often describe the moments where I’m feeling low or not neurologically myself as needing to stop the snow on the television; the picture is almost tuned in but there’s an imperceptible shift in the ether that is altering the connection.  I am aware that to some readers the idea of analogue television is alienating but that self same feeling of disconnection I feel to be universal. It is this feeling I am reminded of upon first viewing the exhibition.   

The black and white lines of conformity in my brain are making way to sizzling static then finally the reality we perceive to be true.  Amongst all the people in the gallery sensations become shared, overwhelm is quelled.  Our emotions equalised in the great superposition of familiarity. There is a calm here, akin to the one which descends in the moments immediately after disaster.  The mushroom cloud has dissipated, the volcano erupted. A stillness that comes after all the rage has gone. In this bleached endless space, seemingly featureless and at first glance without anything to hang your eyes upon. My first rush of emotion was an overwhelming sense of loss.  I felt that here was a mind that looks for calm in a place of chaos and latterly that perhaps this is why it reads so well as a comment against our consumerist society. The insurmountable task of tackling the crisis is too much to bare, like staring into the sun. Given time however your eyes adjust and features can be determined out of the white heat of our destruction.  We can be shown the way.   

Walking into the gallery the regolith grey granite arranged as two distinct piles on the floor expands and adds a frigid conformity to an otherwise intimate setting. Like a planet of scorched earth bleached by the baking sun and vitrified by the extreme forces from deep below the earth. This space puts me in mind of the quarries my father worked on in South Wales, converting the waste products of the steel industry into road surfacing.  I often imagined them as the planet of the Cybermen or Skaro from Doctor Who. I never once thought of the processes by which the earth was extracted.  The resources were plentiful and it made for an excellent playground. These spoil tips now lay as memories of an industry now lost to time. Nature reclaiming the scars of our need.   

But these childhood remembrances are a short respite to what the work conveys. The low ceiling and squat walls are daubed in a grey, almost smokey paint effect further reinforcing the desolation of the scene on display.  Upon this nuclear winter wasteland are a series of structures with grid like arrangements of shape to form shelves. Continental plates and tectonic shifts in perception.  Their shadows left to cast melancholy forms that while left to cast beautiful stained glass like impressions on the walls in the first instance are also claustrophobic in their regimented, cell like structures.  These put me in mind of artificial walkways and open gantry stairways of industrial buildings.  This use of meaty chunky metallic structure juxtaposed in order to create a soft texture through careful consideration of light and placement instills in the viewer a sense of impermanence and danger.  A barrier between the worlds of the modern and the historical.  

These cell like structures are also found among the dust on the floor.  Here they act to obscure welded steel approximations of carcasses, animals twisted and transmuted by time.  Their forms are left entombed by the metal grids acting as an accidental semi permeable shroud. But among this erstwhile featureless tomb treasures are to be found.  Among the forgotten and the scorched earth a hostile and austere collection of objects is accentuated by the colour sapping orange Edison lamps. These moments of illumination while meant as a salve against the soulless grey actually reinforce the archaeological science fiction surrealism of the space.  Imperceptible variations in gradient and morphology are heightened by the eerie glow which feels oddly radioactive.  The after burn of something mighty and destructive.  But amongst this destruction tokens of hope.  Votive offerings of pewter coins, a nod to Charlesworth’s earlier works and reference to her recent visits to Herculaneum and Pompeii.  The granite piles an approximation of volcanic ash and pyroclastic flow.   

Charlesworth has a fascination with archaeological excavations and volcanoes. The primal rage of our earth lying dormant, the creation and destruction as well as fertilisation off the land all tied together. We cannot hope to silence the roar of the mountain but learn to accept its rhythms.  We do all we can to not cause greater harm and live within our means.  It also offers us a clue into the solutions Charlesworth offers up for the ending of our collective woe, we must look back to see the way forward.  

Before leaving the gallery I overhear one last surprise, a recording of the wind roaring through the space. A reminder that to nature all things must surrender themselves and ultimately shall all return. Where at first instance the work can be dismissed as bleak and abstractly lifeless, extinguished leaving less than nothingness the true message is one of hope for a future where we view natures lessons as ones which teach us our future path.  Does this collection of works answer the question of civilisation? In a way it shows us that our obsession with ornamentation and greed shall be all for naught, to some that will be bleak but to others a call to live for the now.  Are you muted and abstract or a bright figurine?