VOICES CAUGHT IN THE EARTH

Wilder Gallery is thrilled to announce its participation in the inaugural Echo Soho Art Fair, 16 - 19 October, London, where we will be presenting an intimate showcase of new works by Xanthe Burdett.

Burdett's presentation, Voices Caught In The Earth, features her signature large-scale painting and a series of intimately scaled oil and metal leaf works on board.

Working at both large and very small scales, Xanthe Burdett’s paintings explore the relationship between human and nonhuman entities. In Voices Caught in the Earth, bodies emerge from the soil as though rooted and curling plant fronds form human faces; her multiplicitous non-anthropocentric visual worlds celebrate the compelling unruliness of plants and the strangenesses of the human stories we use to attempt to understand our environments.

This body of work, particularly the large painting Lady Bertilak, is closely inspired by the medieval story of Gawain and the Green Knight, in which a knight who is “grass green and greener still” challenges Sir Gawain to deal him a blow with his sword, after which the knight will return the favour. Gawain cuts off his opponent’s head, only for the knight to pick it up and ride off laughing, apparently unaffected. The Green Knight, who exhibits a plant-like indifference to beheading, and his wife Lady Bertilak, whose role is to test Gawain’s purity by trying to seduce him, evoke the uncanny and unruly wildness of nature, revealing the weirdness of the places where human and nonhuman forces meet.

However, Burdett’s painting does not constitute a simple illustration of a moment in the Gawain story, instead alluding obliquely to several aspects of the narrative. The work also contains echoes of art historical paintings of Salome holding the head of St John the Baptist, as well as hints of the pale figures of classical sculpture and ancient mythologies of metamorphosis. The work holds a variety of references without demanding that the viewer tear open the image and analyse it, instead insisting on an acceptance of ambiguity and multiplicity.

For her large-scale paintings, Burdett begins on a base of clear-primed grey linen. Using a traditional technique of Renaissance fresco painters, she draws her figures onto paper before transferring them to the canvas using chalk. She paints the figures in white gesso, then instinctively applies washes of intense green colour over the top. As a result, the human bodies gain an otherworldly luminosity, as though gazing out through a veil of colour which separates their pictorial space from that of the viewer. Finally, Burdett adds the details, delineating delicate facial features and twining foliage.

By contrast, her smaller works are created on boards coated with polished metal leaf. Here, she sprinkles solvents onto thin oil washes to create a speckled effect, relinquishing total painterly control and allowing her materials their own agency. She then adds layers of glazes to create depth and detail, resulting in works that are simultaneously gleaming and somehow muddy, recalling the underground worlds she depicts in these tiny paintings.

Like the larger pieces, the small works evoke a variety of mythologies and traditions, recalling gilded religious icons, medieval illustrations of mandrake plants, and folkloric tales of the underworld. Across this series, soil becomes a space of potential narratives and a portal to the other worlds that exist alongside us. For instance, Portent features an image of a dog stepping lightly upon its own shadow, reflecting Burdett’s interest in the mythological role of dogs as guides between different states of being. The pieces featuring human-like figures similarly express a condition of inbetweenness; slipping mercurially between an earthy groundedness and a mystical ethereality. Text by Anna Souter

Echo Soho champions female-led galleries, amplifying their influence in contemporary art in the heart of London's Soho.

Fair Dates
Friday 17 October: 11 AM – 6 PM
Saturday 18 October: 11 AM – 6 PM
Sunday 19 October: 11 AM – 4 PM

Address
Artists House
14 Manette Street
Soho
London