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<\/a>Hannah Hughes: installation view<\/p>\nAn unusual location for a show provides an interesting perspective on the work of Hannah Hughes. \u2019After Fragments\u2019 is at Swedenborg House, which takes forward the legacy of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). He made his name as a pioneering and influential scientist before switching tack \u2013 at 55 \u2013 after experiencing vivid dreams and visions which he believed had opened up the spiritual world, enabling him to converse with angels and devils and visit the afterlife. In 1758 he published\u00a0\u2018Heaven and Hell\u2019, which outlined his notion of correspondences: that everything in the physical universe corresponds to a spiritual value.<\/p>\n
Hughes shows two bodies of work. First, her well-established series of collages constructed from the space between things \u2013 she has extracted the negative spaces between people or objects in magazine images to build up an archive \u2013 so what we see is not so much abstraction as the abstract elements between representations.\u00a0 In these works, the fragments used to make the collages have been created by photographing shadows cast from the original archive of cut-outs against backdrops in the studio. The new \u2018negative spaces\u2019 are cut out, and these fragments are assembled to make the images.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n As the show title suggests, Hughes is \u2018interested in how images exist in the memory as fragments, and how this might relate to the ways that we process photographic images in digital spaces\u2019.<\/p>\n Second, \u2018After Fragments\u2019 includes a new departure in ceramic: glazed stoneware vessels which seem to have been cut in half, the cross-section revealing intricate internal structures. The depth here is real, unlike in the collages, yet the flat presentation of the truncations is their most compelling element. One might think of archaeological discoveries or speculate on possible industrial functions, but it is also no stretch to read the ceramics in bodily terms, like anatomical diagrams revealing the organs within. They also provide a three-dimensional route into reflecting, as Hughes puts it, on \u2018the duality of the relationship between parts and wholes, the entanglements of things with place and time, and the symbolic potency of fragments intentionally broken or incomplete\u2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n So what would Swedenborg say? James Wilson, who has written on him extensively, adds a stimulating essay which kicks off by explaining how Swedenborg\u2019s representations are immersive visual elements that convey a correspondence with a spiritual meaning. He sees a parallel with how Hughes \u2018taps into all this \u2013 combinations of shapes and forms that speak of meanings from other planes\u2019. That leads Wilson to speculate that he is glimpsing \u2018strange planetary bodies in rare moments of alignment before they carry on spinning through their elliptical orbits\u2019. And he notes that both Swedenborg\u2019s representations and Hughes\u2019 collages and ceramics constitute non-verbal languages through which we have a glimpse of a different reality. You don\u2019t have to buy into the spiritual for this to resonate with how the art operates: the sense of there being something beyond the visible is central to both, albeit Swedenborg sought to explain, whereas Hughes is content to suggest.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Paul Carey-Kent selects a \u2018Gallery of the Month\u2019, a \u2018Show of the Month\u2019, a \u2018Work of the Month\u2019 and a \u2018Book of the Month\u2019 for his weekly column in FAD. A collection of previous gallery columns,\u00a0\u2018Paul\u2019s Galleries To Go\u2019, is\u00a0available from FAD Bazaar.\u00a0<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n CategoriesTagsAuthor <\/a>Hannah Hughes: \u2018Tuck XXV\u2019, 2024<\/p>\n<\/a>Hannah Hughes: \u2018Guest II\u2019, 2026<\/p>\n<\/p>\n