I Want To Believe - Solo Exhibition @ Cardiff MADE 2022
I Want to Believe
Introduction Text - Ellie Young 2022
I began making and painting relief tiles during lockdown. The images i used were from everywhere - items in the news, films and tv we were watching, as well as things i’d had saved in my phone for years. They are almost stream of consciousness and form a kind of diary of the last year or so. As they began to amass certain motifs became repeated and I started to form connections in my mind between the women smoking and the women spewing ectoplasm, and the veils of veronica (cloth on which Jesus’ face appeared.) As I’ve been making new work for this exhibition i’ve been drawing on the connections between the disparate thoughts in the tiles.
Zoe at Cardiff MADE introduced me to the writer Sian Hughes. We began an exciting conversation finding common ground in the things that inspire us and Sian has written stories reacting to some of the ideas and images in the show. Through Sian’s stories and reactions to the work I’ve come to understand some of these connected ideas better and to see some of the new ways the images can be interpreted. In particular, both of us share a fascination with the relationship between belief and disbelief, not just belief in a religious or spiritual sense, but in it its broadest forms, illustrated for example by our willingness to suspend our disbelief whilst we are watching a TV show, or by our continuing attachment to superstitious ideas. Smoke, ectoplasm, veils, mysterious images on cloth, all of these are partly metaphors for the ways in which nebulous, ethereal ideas still cling to us, and us to them, ideas which we perhaps use to protect ourselves from our own transience.
One narrative thread I am still pulling at is a memory I have of being shown what must have been a replica Turin Shroud in a small Sunday school in Cardiff in the late 80s. I can still remember what it felt like to believe something unquestioningly. I’ve always been quick to suspend my disbelief. I get easily absorbed in other stories, in fictional worlds of films and tv and books and art. I’d like to stay open to all the possibilities whilst committing to none of them.
A lot of the sources for the work are nostalgic for me: The X Files, Buffy, Ghost, belonging as they do to a time in my life when belief was a less complicated affair. The frame of reference is becoming more and more layered and frayed at the edges however, as I go deeper into the work. I have reached a point where Dot Cotton, Whoopi Goldberg and Mary Magdalene can all coexist in the same chain of thought, perhaps because all these women are, in various ways, Real but not Real, products of our imagination as consumers and as human beings, religious and cultural icons on to whom we have projected our need to believe in something greater than ourselves.