Scene IV: Sara Birns, It Takes Hard Work to Get to Heaven

Matt Carey-Williams, Sandy Lane, Wiltshire, May 2024

PROLOGUE

And as we walk on down the road
Our shadows longer than our souls,
All that glitters is not gold
Wanna be a rock and not a roll
Oh, the great almighty dollar leaves you lonely, lost and hollow
You can't fool yourself forever
You gotta work to get to heaven
Stairway to heaven.

Dolly Parton’s modified lyrics in her 2002 version of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven from her bluegrass project album, Halos and Horns. Parton changed lines four to seven of the final verse in her version. The original was written by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant in November 1971.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

– George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah (1918-21).

Sara Birns’ paintings whisk us – excited, maybe even a little flummoxed - through a circus house of mirrors; a space that interrogates both the paradigm and parable of human physiognomy (and, naturally, all that it sheathes underneath) in a manner simultaneously visceral, uncanny yet still sympathetic. Faces remain a constant stream of focus for the artist and under her watchful eye they bubble and blush; curve and curse into a myriad of forms and guises, each gifting a medley of emotions as monstrous as they are sentimental.

Birns’ protagonists betray features that seem to incomprehensibly morph before our eyes, to such an extent that her visages slip between taxonomic cracks: indexically and quite literally. She has invested a series of frogs with human features; melded the human body with the cutesy quintessence of a woolly lamb. Frankenstein-like, Birns has sewn together separate heads into conjoined avatars of Narcissism and, even when her protagonist is merely engaged with another spirit – human or animal – their entanglement is inevitable and as slippery as the skin on her greasy, dilated pore of Winer-addled actors. Juxtaposition operates as contradistinction. Morphology is metamorphosis. In Sara Birns’ art the language of being can only be articulated by the vagaries and vicissitudes of becoming.

Sara Birns, What's it Like 3, 2024, Oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm (45 5/8 x 35 in)

Picasso famously asked, when painting a face, whether the artist looked on, inside or behind it. Birns asks the very same questions, however, rather than let her faces issue Picasso’s simultaneity of time, space, and form, quick-licked by his arabesques of oily osculation - she moulds her figure into a decipherable model and empowers the electricity of its estrangement with her viewer exactly because of – not despite – its legibility. The grotesquery of Birns’ faces is not the result of Picasso’s deformation or denaturing of the human form. Hers are not faces that slide into the quicksand of abstraction, eventually becoming subsumed by it, just as Picasso’s vernacular tested the human form. No, the horror and, indeed, bathos of Frankenstein lies not in some chimerical witchcraft, but in the simple fact that Mary Shelley’s monster was created by stitching together several parts of other bodies to create a new one. The monster crafted not from the unknown but from the known, not ethereal but in fact adamantly of this earth. The scars of its creation inducing fear and pity in equal measure, much in the same way that Birns’ faces make you stop, stare, sometimes giggle and sometimes prickle with panic.

So it is that Picasso and Frankenstein join William Shakespeare’s Duncan from Macbeth (1606) in his effort to illuminate the chameleonic pith of both self and surface which blights the human condition. When Duncan declares “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” (Act I, Scene IV)he is registering his inability to read Macbeth and by extension, the numerous desires both lusty and murderous he wants to hide. It is an incapacity of Duncan’s that ultimately leads to his own demise. Birns’ faces likewise revel in their visual syncopation of ‘just-so’ hyperbole and almost-palatable litotes, yet their emotional impact swerves wildly between moments of sedate sanity and delicious delirium. Rivulets of oppositional forces thus course through Birns’ paintings and it is these binaries, between soliloquys of self and tapestries of alterity; between the burden of weight and the grace of lightness, that journey towards a delta directing Birns’ figures – and their viewer – to destinations either heavenly, earthly or hellish.

Sara Birns, What's it Like 2, 2024, Oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm (45 5/8 x 35 in)

No wonder, then, that Birns’ latest group of actors engage us in an angelic apotheosis, flighting us on a journey above and beyond what is both understood or expected. A journey - aesthetic, philosophical and perhaps even spiritual - that requires hard work to unpick the ever-pulsating etiology of Birns’ figures but which, when unravelled, reveals some of those indescribable secrets we often refer to as ‘soul’. Some of her protagonists are human(oid), others cygnine, canine and feline. Some are angels. Some are not. Together they sound the chorus of opposites outlined above, all marked on Birns’ curious contours, slippery skin and velvety feathers that, equally, gets so under our skin as both craft and narrative, sign and signifier.

I: SELF AS OTHERS

It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out

– Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (2013).

Sara Birns, What's it Like 1, 2024, Oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm (45 5/8 x 35 in)

Three of the seven works in this exhibition depict angels. Looming, Brobdingnagian faces - pushed to the front of the picture plane - huff, puff and cackle as they stare – in unison to the left – out of the confines of the pictorial space. Each of them is blessed with white, swan-like angel wings, and each are set against the romance of a kaleidoscopic, sun-setting sky. They are each titled What’s it Like (2024): a suitably elastic title, deliberately devoid of question mark, that chimes neatly with the somewhat inchoate nature of their ever-evolving finish together with the ambiguity of the ungrounded location they all occupy.

Consistent with Birns’ practice, these three angels are hybrids: this time of her own face, her partner Adam’s, and her twin sister, Sesha’s: the two people in the world she knows best. Teeth, eyes (all of them rosily tinted as if they’ve just enjoyed a joint to help these angels go just that little bit higher), lips, chins and brows can all be identified as belonging to one individual sitter yet their integrity wobbles as the artist explores the variety of physiognomic (re)tessellations available to her.

Birns’ selection of facial features is thus akin to her choices of colours: the mood she wants to evince (the haughtiness of the first version or the nervous chuckle of the third, for example) being determined by the shape of her palette of protagonists and the shades of the colours she works with. Colour and likeness each arrives at its own passage of singularity ironically because of Birns’ concerted effort to discombobulate their original status. Self is thus achieved by the congregation of others just as each angel floats across its miasma of mystery and achieves its own certitude in those soft, nebulous clouds that caress it whilst disenfranchising it; just as Sara finds both sanctuary and meaning of and for herself in alienated abbreviations of her partner and her twin.

II: HEAVINESS IN LIGHT

Gotta have opposites, light and dark and dark and light, in painting. It’s like in life. Gotta have a little sadness once in a while so you know when the good times come.

– Bob Ross on The Joy of Painting (Season 23, Episode 3: Mountain Ridge Lake, 17 September 1991)

Otherness and opposition abound in distinctions of weight and incandescence. ‘Heavy’ carrying overtones of both bulk and burden; ‘light’ suggesting both illumination and airiness. All three angels’ faces are made up of blocks of generally quite heavy, ruddy tones; a leathery skin dominating the surface made even more complex and confrontational by Birns’ acute attention to pores, blemishes, or watery eyes. Afflictions that would stymie anybody’s efforts to fly high and feel good about themselves. Yet, gently embracing and thus diluting such heaviness, and allowing these figures to hover, are the sky and their wings. Soft, delicate, and associated with flying, the contrast offered here both symbolically and physically as brushwork is telling and whilst their conversation hums only in each composition’s background, the feeling of (potential) release – physically and emotionally – never leaves the viewer. At any moment one feels these angels could quite happily drift off into the ether, unburdened and unfettered by such terrestrial travails, transforming the pique of epiphora into the paradise of euphoria.

Sara Birns, Cinnamon Roll , 2024, Oil pastel and coloured pencil on tan paper, 38.1 x 27.9 cm (15 x 11 in)

Sara Birns, Snowflake, 2024, Oil Pastel and coloured pencil on tan paper, 38.1 x 27.9 cm (15 x 11 in)

Sara Birns, Cinnamon Roll , 2024, Oil pastel and coloured pencil on tan paper, 38.1 x 27.9 cm (15 x 11 in)

Sara Birns, Snowflake, 2024, Oil Pastel and coloured pencil on tan paper, 38.1 x 27.9 cm (15 x 11 in)

The opposition between forces light and dark, solid and evanescent, is the lubricant that oils our next two protagonists. Snowflake (2024) and Cinnamon Roll (2024) are a Persian cat and a pug bursting with personalities that could not be more different: the former devoid of any fucks to give for anything; the latter loving absolutely every second of life, but both exuding that quizzical ambiguity, hopscotching between delight, doubt, and dissatisfaction, that so marks the fluidity of Birns’ angels. The history of portraits of domestic animals is well known, however, the artist’s treatment of these two animals transcends any formal concerns with likeness or other concerns with status. Neither animal is particularly beautiful (even if they are lively), but in juxtaposition they continue the angels’ conversation around gravity and grace as well as unravel further the dynamic between innocence and experience that penetrates all the works in this exhibition and colours their contortion.

III: HEAVEN ON EARTH IN HELL

What has always made a Hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his Heaven.

– Johan Christian Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion (1797).

Sara Birns, A Visit, 2024, Oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm (57 1/2 x 44 7/8 in)

As angels glide in celestial realms of eternal sunshine, and household pets playfight their tiny, impeccant contests down below, what, then, of the darker yet, still lower terrain? What or who do we find fallen to such depths? Birns’ answer is a swan and a single eye. If not the most searching catechism of surface, nor the most amiable or familiar of subjects, A Visit (2024) and Eye (2024) are certainly the dreamiest paintings in the exhibition.

A swan, light as their feathers, finds itself clumsily stuck in the hole of an unusual tree, its fleshy, caramel bark peeling like old, sunburnt skin. The bird, white but glowing with a pinkish radiation and blessed with a jet-black, latex beak that looks like a novel gimp mask, stares out (as all these protagonists do) to the left. Look closely at the eye and you will very soon realise that it is not cygnine: its light blue colour and slender almond shape at odds with a real swan’s black dot of an eye, suggesting it belongs to the artist or her partner or sister. As on high, so down low does such tricky transmogrification occur, yet here, even if the metamorphosis is less pronounced, the mood remains more distressed; melancholic, even. Registered in the dark, heavy clouds that swirl in the background and the amorphous, shadowy silhouette of darkness that swells below it. In Birns’ universe, the only animal that can fly, does not. The only one with real white feathered wings sees them tinted and tainted into ultimate redundancy. The aspirations and apotheosis of our stricken yet successful angels at odds with this delectably downcast scene and the swan’s mauve dénouement.

Sara Birns, Eye, 2024, Oil on board, 40.5 x 30.5 cm (16 x 12 in)

We are left with Eye. Phonically ‘Aye’ as well as ‘I’ yet it is an image that resists the affirmation of particularized identity. Rather, Magritte-like, Birns’ anonymous, everyman eye rests, supine, on the ground, staring up and out into a hole in the clouds, breaking the sky’s ominous darkness and raining rays of hopeful light down upon it. Yet the eye doesn’t move. It doesn’t react to the drama unfolding above. It appears to stay, still and silent, blankly staring to the Heavens above. The peculiarity of this offbeat, bulbous eye – seen only in challenging isolation – is exacerbated by Birns’ remarkable ability to render the most miniscule, exquisite detail. Skin glistens with a moist glow. Tiny light lashes curl off the lower eyelid like hungry maggots. The sclera looks spray-tanned whilst the iris seems to glow angrily in ambers and embers like Sauron’s. All of this dropped into an eye socket that is off kilter, pushing the eye out and askew. In this lower plane – a theatre of shadow and uncertainty - one looks up to Heaven thinking they are on Earth, only to realise that the greatest trick of them all (to paraphrase Christopher McQuarrie’s Verbal) is afoot and that we’re not where we think we are or where we want to be.

The Devil lies in all of us, made manifest as a panoply of angry, ugly emotions that seem to occasionally control us, rather than be under our control. One moment you think you’re in Heaven only to crash down to Earth as you realise you’ve been in Hell all along. With that in mind we can turn back to Dolly Parton’s tiny lyrical intervention with Page and Plant’s masterpiece: ‘you gotta work to get to heaven’. Whatever your religious, spiritual, humanist or material perspective on life is, one thing almost everyone believes in – and Dolly is the paragon of this particular virtue - is that to be able to enjoy a life of light and love, you must work hard to get there. The intensity, struggle, and endeavour of Sara Birns’ protagonists, at odds with time, space and dimension, clearly suggests as much: their faces, bodies, and minds searching for an authenticity and clarity that, today, feels lost in the confusion of contemporaneity. Sara Birns’ hard work leaves us with a simple question: where the fuck do we find our Heaven? The answer – be that a space, dream, person, angel, ambition or pet pug - begins with hard work.

And so to work.