The Beginning

The beginning is only the end seen backwards in the exhibition, Ebb Spiked, curated by Dan Allison for Kupfer Project Space in London. This show brings together five multidisciplinary artists whose variegated practices all press - as a form of physical pressure and intellectual resistance – against ordinarily articulated canonical assumptions, be they empowered by the proposition (and entanglement) of object and subject or, equally, contained and even diluted by the limitations placed on the shape and shuffle of artistic process. This is a show where painting is performative; where sound rests in space like sculpture; where words become colours; where text, subtext and context are all interrogated to such an extent that the language we usually use to describe art (and its author[ity]) no longer really satisfies given the prismatic lens the exhibition offers and, by extension, the multivalence of meanings it issues, as idea, narrative and debate.

This exhibition sparkles in a space of deliberate contradistinction, announced by the oxymoron Allison proposes with its title. That which ebbs (tides or emotions, for example) disclose a movement of recession or gradual decrease. It’s opposite action – the increase we call flow – chimes neatly with the texture of the word, spiked: a note that signals not just any increase but its amplification to a point of no return. The spike of a stock or a heartbeat; the spiking of a drink that immediately shifts experience and equilibrium, leaving its recipient vulnerable. Together, as a lexical construct, each word pushes against the other within the domain of the phrase – as syntax and semantics - imbuing each individual motion with an energy that, equally, unveils its own collective commotion. So it is that the gentle lap of the ebbing tide – reassuring in its inexorable return - is juxtaposed (yet loops) with a moment shocked into hyperbole. A state of unrest thus prevails. One that offers tectonic wobbles to our usual pillars of understanding, shaking a new world where discipline, experience and modality look, sound and feel different and which, when presented together, offer an ever-evolving, loopy synthesis of form, function and signification.

The First Loop

James Alec Hardy creates environments and installations that explore several visual, technological and performative vernaculars, both in isolation and in coalition. However, the immersion he offers – as both object and experience – does not rest on the stasis or solution provided by mere hybridity. One plus one does not equal just another one in Alec Hardy’s work. Rather, it is the very DNA of transition – materially as object; epistemologically as process – that propels his body of work. The actors of Alec Hardy’s enigmatic stage are many of art’s usual suspects: image, film, sound, performance, installation, light. Add to that cast blockchain technology, the internet, scanners, game engines and virtual reality, and the theatre in which Alec Hardy asks us to sit and explore the sound of time and the broken darkness of space begins to reverberate with a unique energy and curiosity, at once lively yet deadly; complex yet visceral.

Alec Hardy often begins with rather rudimentary analogue video production technology, which he then unpicks and converts digitally. Herein lies the germ of the artist’s transition and the illumination such conversion sheds on the pulse of his enterprise. The result is, oftentimes, a four-dimensional space in that it presents a stage both ambient and digital; both IRL and online; both fixed and fluid, with that space interrogating the viewer’s preconceptions about the nature of objecthood, performance and, above all else, the mechanics and dynamic of simply looking at art.

In Ebb Spiked, Alec Hardy’s untitled new work is an object made up of four cathode-ray tube video monitors stacked one on top of the other and displayed on a plinth. Each screen plays analogue video streams that have been manipulated by the artist. It is a somewhat ‘traditional’ form of display that is then very carefully and elegantly discombobulated. Alec Hardy has a long, luxurious piece of iridescent blue fabric cascade down from the ceiling above, shrouding the displayed object with a diaphanous shimmer that physically distorts it, the video it plays and the very act of taking in the work given that the viewer is now forced to look at the screen through a tiny slit cut into the fabric. The result is an object and experience, born of obsolescence, nurtured by abstraction and which only achieves its realisation as an act of negation. Revelation resides in burial; performance tracks the trace of an object as the object of its own trace: haunting, alluring, challenging. Sound, object, installation and performance all dance together, inviting the viewer to ponder not just the physical ambience of an experience, but the simultaneity – temporal, spatial and emotional – that underpins the arc and act of seeing.

The Second Loop

Jody DeSchutter’s enterprise is an entanglement of numerous disciplines, resisting any one singular lexis, praxis or inspiration. Her creative endeavours embrace painting, performance, spoken word, poetry, sound, sculpture and music, all of which (as individual pursuits) loop back into one another, serving a kaleidoscopic manner of making and meaning that forever chimes, connects and converses with itself. Hers is a game with no endgame; a surface of sound as form by colour that both creates and confronts a landscape of paradox and quarrel always evolving, devolving and resolving in never-ending curlicues of self-sponsorship and reciprocity. DeSchutter sings like a sculpture. She paints like a poem. She writes like a mysterious flourish of hitherto unheard notes on a piano made from velvet and alliteration. Loops of execution - synapses of synaesthesia; modems of metamorphosis - nourish and confront, correlate and discombobulate in equal measure.

It is this choreography of task and timbre that electrifies her painting, A Mirage That Perceived Itself (2024). Executed in oils on panel, the painting initially unveils easily understood elements of figures occupying a ground. But then we look closer, and faces begin to swish into abbreviation. Bodies coagulate, dislocate and reform: gaining limbs, losing heads. A ground that at first appears aqueous and fluent, bobbing between reflection and inflection, soon betrays its gluey depth, capturing then confining an already denatured delineation and sucking that into its magmatic eddies of sticky pattern. Form - and thus intent - shifts. Both as and on a surface that quarrels with itself yet, in one ravishing ‘scape of painterly performance and preparation, also elevates it in curious, cunning harmony. Just as Jody’s many-stringed bow innately fashions objects that seem to speak so many languages - quantum as optimum - the viewer’s act of looking, likewise, is stretched resulting in a suspension of belief and disbelief made more mellifluous, precious and ironic.

Alongside her painting, DeSchutter will create and perform a sound installation, Eurydice (2025). As the title suggests, this work muses on the power of music as it celebrates love but laments it loss. Eurydice - the wife of the musician Orpheus – died from a snakebite. Oprheus, ravaged with grief, went to the Underworld to plead with Hades for his wife’s return to the land of the living. Hades, taken by Orpheus’ delicious sorrow, agreed, but on one condition: that he did not look back at his wife until they had departed the Underworld. Orpheus looked – nervous that Eurydice was not following him - and she was duly sucked back in to the darkness for eternity. DeSchutter’s sound, coupled with her epic text, flows then jars; teases a crescendo only to deflate back into the solitude of singularity. It is a mesmerising noise, elevated by the musicality of her poetic voice but which truly comes alive when performed by the artist in a body suit replete with the instruments she plays throughout the performance. It is only then that DeSchutter transforms herself into Eurydice and Orpheus; conjures the exhibition space into Heaven and Hell and asks her viewer to look – both forwards and backwards – into the light and darkness of a love lost, yet which lingers, like a reflection, in all of us.

The Third Loop

Eva Dimitriakopoulou’s work offers a kind of demulcent desolation with sculptures and installations that speak of and to the body – human and politic – as a site of increasing distress yet which, because of their curvilinear, searching line, seductive surfaces and embrace of, often, edible or olfactory ingredients, offers an organic balm to the ague of artifice that so plagues contemporaneity and which so fascinates Dimitriakopoulou. Their objects thus dazzle as both confession and absolution, meandering between phrases physical and ethereal, unearthing not just their own palpable uncertainty as objects but, by extension, feeding that quizzing hum that seems, today, to embalm trust and paralyse truth.

Thyromantificate (2024) is an object fashioned from Perspex, resin and steel into which the artist has placed a litany of LED lights. The binary bounce between conflicting weltanschauungen, orchestrated so lyrically by the artist in her work, sits just as poetically in this object’s title: a beautiful fusion the Greek thyra and mantis. The former meaning door or thyroid gland; the latter meaning oracle or the insect. Are we presented with an object that, like Huxley’s doors, open to invigorated perception and revelation? Or does this object wend its way to a darker space, one coloured by patterns of control or threat. Thyroid glands regulate metabolic development yet mantises prey; one self seeks to sustain itself whilst the other seeks to subsume the other.

It is this diversion of meaning – one destined for oracular sovereignty, the other headed to risk and apocalypse – that offers the ingredients of Dimitriakopoulou’s practice. It is the marriage of those meanings that lends their practice its gravity. This object, stretching out into space with a series of liquid, lavender lines that morph between genuflection and attack, certainly encompasses both tributaries. Insect-like, Thyromantificate immediately recalls the attacking mantis, with its raised raptorial legs and ominously protruding head. Yet that fear and anxiety soon dissolves as the object relaxes into a network of delightful arabesques, with the artist’s three-dimensional line enchanting as it plies, releves and sautes in and through space. Our desire for progress, investment and reward often feeds the misery of our realm of understanding, now made bereft of any real shape by the anxiety and trauma created and perpetuated by so many governments. Dimitriakopoulou beautifully – and rather tragically (in the most epic sense) - unveils that with an object that becomes a murmur of its own metabolism, as disquieting as it is ornamental.

The Fourth Loop

Jonny Green’s practice focuses on painting, but his craft has been nourished by a celebrated career in music, having recorded several albums and movie soundtracks. In Green’s world, paint riffs off itself, throwing out feedback, of palette and brush, of figure and ground; it screeches and echoes as much as it suffuses with harmony and balance. Yet whilst there remains an undeniable sense of orchestration and musicality to Green’s latest body of paintings, it is an oeuvre that is influenced by different chords of invention.

The artist has long been fascinated by the science of psychedelics and, during the pandemic-induced lockdown in 2020, he explored several subjects that involved the use of psychoactive compounds and the (propensity for) coercion that they brought. It is this weight of intimidation such hallucinogenic duress brings that is the key to Green’s latest paintings and which, in turn, colour his decision to dive into the domain of survivalist cults: a subject that, thanks to everyone’s favourite social media algorithm, became almost impossible to unsee given that so many people were exploring survival on the internet during that time. The need to survive is thus aligned with the desire to control; cultism is, likewise, likened to the different states of consciousness – or otherness – that drugs like LSD proffer.

Green has thus created an archival document that chronicles the history of a cult – the ‘Commune’ - also invented by the artist. From more than just literature, Green purloins trajectories of thought from politics, science, and philosophy, with all three disciplines (turning on, tuning in and dropping out) questioning the vagaries and vicissitudes of our various constructions of truth and control. Except Green takes it a stage further by having something completely fabricated – like a lie – question the very dynamo of our truth telling. Ours is a world where one person’s fact is another’s fiction; where the granularity and certainty of truth no longer hold any weight given the constant reformulation of it, as pattern and paradigm; as desire and design.

Green illustrates his invented archive with images or artifacts (read that word semantically and then carefully hear that word phonetically and you already get the gist of Green’s subtle, clever, slippery signification) of his invented protagonists undertaking invented acts. Each image appears serious – even melancholy at times – and yet each painting delights with Green’s hallucinogenic palette, fashioning figures that express a certain humaneness as well as those he has found (and then manipulated) from a well of pop culture, absorbing sources from the annals of visual art, film, social media and cartoons, for example. Bodyguards (2025) depicts a green figure, decorated with clown-like make-up, protecting two figures that look like Teletubbies, Eskimos or supporters of a very niche form of BDSM leaving Berghain. Around them hover plumes of hellish, sulphuric smoke, perhaps escaping from an invisible tear gas canister, further befuddling figure and ground and their expected but absent nexus. Behind them a series of graffitied marks, some of them trying to evince the sound of a figure, push against the figural group in haunting hues of turquoise and lilac. A door to the right offers either a hope to escape or signals the end of this road.

Green’s paintings slip in and out of several strands of signification because he demands his viewer to suspend their disbelief to such an extent that a green-faced man can become the handsome hero saving his friends from the debauched hands of a cult, all the while knowing that every step of the creative journey they take in looking at Green’s work is one born of invention. Verisimilitude only deceives. Action only misleads. Truth is but a fabric of lies. That’s what drugs do to you. That’s what politics does for you. What remains is not the account of a real story but a surface as abstract and malleable as it is figurative and concrete. It is that osmosis of fiction into truth (and vice versa) that so interests Jonny Green and which, in a world where elections are won by those who own the widest means of communication, carries such angsty resonance for us all today.

The Fifth Loop

The bedrock of Laima Leyton’s work is music. As both an individual pursuit but also as a collaborative enterprise as she continues to play in the band, Soulwax and produce other musicians’ work. Her interest in sound, narrative, performance, readymade, photography and installation all grow out of this most fertile field for Leyton, with music acting as the enzyme transfiguring object, note, image or phenomena into a different language or morphology. For example, Leyton has modified household appliances so that they can play synthesised sounds, investing them with the ability to filter or reverb. Likewise, the artist’s continued interest in domestication, spirituality and motherhood is nurtured by her need to make music, as if the vibration that creates melds these interests together, like stitches across a tapestry of being. Leyton also reuses props, installations or objects from one performance and repurposes them in others, only this time acknowledging the skin that phenomenon has acquired from its previous iteration and utilisation. So it is that Leyton brings the music studio onto the stage which is then rebuilt in an art gallery only for that exhibition space to filter back into the music studio. The future is always born from the past and ignited by the present; in Leyton’s universe, they flicker in curious, yet beautiful synchronicity, serving a multiplicity of means but an omniscience of mien that is impossible to ignore.

Fight or Light (2025) is an installation made up of a set of praying hands resting on an acrylic plinth, surrounded by speakers playing a sound loop of a heartbeat, all of which takes place under an illuminated mirror ball. The fight rests in the contest between the various disciplines. It is also felt most sincerely in the hands that pray. The light is, of course, articulated by the mirror ball: an object designed to celebrate a moment by covering a space in cascades of scintillating light. Together they sound like a contradiction in terms and yet the expression ‘to give light’ means, in Brazil, ‘to give birth’. The hands pray for life; the heartbeat signals it; the mirror ball declares it. The title of the work also cleverly riffs off the expression ‘fight or flight’ – to stay or to run – which is a phrase ordinarily associated with violence and male, phallic idiocy. As such, Leyton’s work operates as a kind of feminist form of resistance to that phrase. As the father fights, it is the woman that protects, transcending such polarities and thus issuing the wholeness and beauty of being, experienced holistically even as it is collated by the viewer in part.

The End

The plurality of means that Ebb Spiked celebrates supports an equally diverse set of ideas that dive in and out of this exhibition. This is a show, replete with statement, sensation and seduction that questions the manners and modes of our understanding. The dynamics of how we look, listen and feel all explored by artists whose practices remain potently and deliberately amoebic. After all, what other, linear forms of expression and interrogation can successfully unveil the mosaic of machinations currently discombobulating our world in the same way that artists who reach to several disciplines all at once can? One cannot occupy interior and exterior, be both problem and solution when playing in the same arena of thought or possibility. To achieve such synthesis, one must modify the arena, alter the frame, offer a new lens. To capture the essence of a world whose geology of sense has imploded in on itself, the artist must think in loops; dance with paradox; eschew the ease of mere and mass consumption. Artists that, instead, think not in binaries but in synapses, open wormholes of inspiration that nurture conversations and convergences, will be the seers and shamans we all need to prepare us for the final analysis that the end is only the beginning seen backwards.

Matt Carey-Williams
6-8 April 2025
Sandy Lane, Wiltshire