Emma Kathleen Hepburn Ferrer Instagram – I am showing work in this exhibition on today and tomorrow June 17th/18th @ 133 Gallery @tensionfineart in Penge, London
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*BERM*
Taking its name from an ancient word for a raised bank that borders riversides and canals, BERM occupies a corridor beside Tension Gallery. The show re-imagines a passageway as the main event, its form alluding to the now-lost Croydon Canal which ran through Penge until 1836, the ruins of which can still be seen in Betts Park in Anerley. Sometimes manmade but at times naturally occurring, the berm offers a way to think about edgelands and throughways.
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In my case, a through-way is envisioned as a view into a sacred but fraught space: the hospital chapel, a doorway offering a glimpse into someone’s prayer, desperation, faith, murmur of hope or hopelessness; agony, despair. The doorway is also a physical boundary between the viewer and the worshipper; the skeptic or the believer. Should I enter?
For the bear JJ4, a female bear who murdered the 26-year old Andrea Papi while he was out on a run, the doorway means something bleaker, the back of a van she has been thrown into after being anesthetized, captured (thanks to the red tracker on her ear), and hurled at the center of an ethical-moral debate about whether to euthanize (what a word) her, or not. This was the moment in which JJ4 brushed up against her own fate, ultimately saved (salvaged- who plays God here?) by humanity and released back into the “wild”. I wanted to capture that look of pain and relaxation, an extreme, absolutely physical and nearly existential tiredness that animals have when being tranquilized. That deep, deep sleep that can be the border between life and death, them desperate to hold on yet painfully drifting further and further into that sleepy place.
“BERM” is on June 17th-18th from 12-5 pm.
#jj4 #doorways #pathways #corridors | Posted on 17/Jun/2023 19:42:24
