MERRIN EIRTH - 'I Swallowed a Fly'
Tacit Art - 4th - 22nd December 2024
The artist’s debut show with the gallery last year, ‘My Theatre of Errors’ although confined to small works (around 40 X 35 cm) was one of the calendar highlights for the Melbourne art scene and deserved a review. Unfortunately Melbourne Art Seen was paused due to Covid. This year the opportunity was not to be missed. ‘I Swallowed a Fly’ consists of twelve mostly large oil paintings (183 X 153 cm) in the upstairs gallery to Tacit’s new premises and rings some surprising changes to the artist’s project. Firstly work is larger, less intense or fraught, more elaborately composed. The palette dominated by scarlets, crimsons and vermillion has broadened, cooled, the dense combinations of animals, body parts and food have relaxed, art historical allusion has been replaced with a new attention to background and the use of pattern or graphics, giving the work more of an errant or obscure Pop Art feel, suggesting a new emphasis on structure or organisation.
NB - CLICK ON IMAGES FOR ENLARGEMENT
‘Little Ducks Tread Carefully’ (2024) 183 X 153 cm oil on canvas
A work such as ‘Little Ducks Tread Carefully’ (2024) rotates images of ducklings around an egg and related shapes, a broken yolk or lemon in the lower right, gently advancing a theme of hazard or warning that echoes earlier work. The overlaid lines and geometry add to the new sense of precision and measurement. While the ducklings retain delicate volume and modelling, the overall impression is of a flatter, more formal approach. Against this, the work announces a more expansive, more free-wheeling and free-associating ambit. The complex palette to ‘Little Ducks Tread Carefully’ (2024) underlines this breadth.
A central theme to the earlier show was the nexus between animals, food and people, as phases, as reward or punishment, as extensions to one’s relationships and life. There are the dangers that arise even at a very minor or innocuous level, as posed by bees, ants or spiders for example, the little things that have a way of harming us.
Unfortunately the artist does not have a website. However the gallery provides around thirty-five images of recent work here.
The current show takes its title from the folk song ‘I know an old lady that swallowed a fly’. The lyrics tell of an accumulative consumption of larger animals that finally proves fatal. It is nonsense verse obviously and Eirth’s recent work circles around the theme of consumption, animal impulse and human folly half in jest, but only half.
‘I Don’t Know Why I Swallowed A Fly’ (2024) 153 X 120 cm oil on canvas
In ‘I Don’t Know Why I Swallowed a Fly” (2024) this theme is somewhat defused through more abstract or graphic elements so that fears may be seen to be held in check by formality. Alternatively, the little things may be seen to bring threat even to grander schemes. The fly here acquires a ‘blue tail’ recalling another version of the folk song, while the portrait in the upper left of an older lady, possibly Dame Edna Everage, stretches the arrangement to a person.
'Pin The Tale' (2024) 93 X 103 cm oil on canvas
In ‘Pin The Tale’ (2024) the permutations are played out more vigorously in brushwork, theme and title. Here it is not life’s little bugs that mar but animal vigour not easily separated from a bigger more stable scheme. Whether the beating of a butterfly’s wings or an eventual zebra, the animate spells animus come mealtime. Here too ‘Pin The Tail’ takes on a bloodier association, the term also carrying an explicit sexual meaning, even in today’s rap lyrics.
‘Parking Advice (This One Has Been Such a Tease)’ (2024) 91 X 102 cm oil on canvas
In the cryptically titled ‘Parking Advice (This One Has Been Such a Tease)’ (2024) the blend from graphic to looser or freer handling is more prominent and the sense of a process, of working over and around the composition pauses with a lethal meal and presumably confronts a person to kill the appetite.
The work is the result not so much of a trend in present painting (although the sense is perhaps that Post Modernism is no longer an adequate label) but rather of the artist’s maturity. Eirth (b. 1957) arrives at this expansive approach after a long career that commenced with Neo-Expressionist allegory, embraced assemblage and collage only to steadily refine a private world such as ‘Two Heads For One (1989) into something leaner and progressively more public and familiar in following years
‘Two Heads For One’ (1989) 36.6 X 55.4 cm pastel on paper [NOT IN SHOW]
She has remained teaching in college since 1989 and exhibited regularly up until 2011, when domestic challenges confined exposure to group shows. In slowly resolving private issues, the artist acquired a starker view of the world and a greater confidence in picturing it, amassing a vast cache of small, closely worked oil paintings from 2020 until 2023.
The point is really that some advances take time, take character and engagement with the world rather than mere training and networking. The richness to present work does not rest with art theory but simply the slog of ongoing practice, persistence in the face of life’s not so little challenges. The work feels new but flags experience, tradition.
Another notable departure to the present show is the use of the clown as human presence in her swirling allegories. In the previous show, ‘Pop-Up Pedagogy with Placebo’ (2022) cited the painting ‘Pierrot’ (AKA ‘Giles”) by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) but paired the clown with a prisoner’s uniform and splattered tomatoes, surely signalling disapproval for the figure.
‘Pop-Up Pedagogy With Placebo’ (2022) 35 X 45 cm oil on canvas [NOT IN SHOW]
‘Counterpoint Clowning’ (2024 ) 153 X 183 cm oil on canvas
In the present show the figure of the clown appears in three works, two in which the clown is clearly male, the third and most interesting, is where gender for the main figure is less certain. In ‘Counterpoint Clowning’ (2024) the pierrot now in ‘zebra-striped’ costume is given particularly loose, even cursory treatment while design elements include an outline of a painter’s palette and a looping set of lines variously linking the figure to the wider order with the more contemporary and male clown, Ronald McDonald at the centre.
In conversation the artist explained that the source for the full length figure was an old postcard titled ‘Woman in Clown Costume’, that women frequently played the role and that she saw it as an opportunity to put herself (as an artist with palette) in the role and picture. Whether the gender is discernible beneath the role is moot. Another association that came to mind was the pierrot in the famous 1940s film Les Enfants du Paradis, where the pierrot – ‘Baptiste Deburau’ – is very much the stoic, tragic clown. Also of note in the painting, the splattered tomato on the right now takes on a more stylised, graphic quality, again integrating either food or disgust into the overall design. The three helmeted silhouettes in the lower right involve some play on flatulence and also tend to register as male figures.
‘Fair Bite of The Cherry’ (2024) 153 X 183 cm oil on canvas
In ‘Fair Bite of The Cherry’ (2024) the clown is hardly more than makeup on a middle-aged man, now bracketed with food, raw and cooked, opposite a sizeable Dalmatian. The choice of household pet unavoidably suggests a notorious female character. Significantly, female roles or figures are absent from the work, apart from when adopting a clown’s costume. In lieu of clear female figures, the Dalmatian possibly suggests a surrogate. Interestingly there is no blending or integrating the dog’s spots with the background. The dog is rendered in its entirety or as stand-alone.
Painting For The Inner Clown’ (2024 ) 40 X 60 cm oil on canvas
In ‘Painting for The Inner Clown’ (2024) the clown is now not just a male but a portrait of an individual, the popular American clown Boswick. The work reverts to the small scale and solid red background of the previous show, and with it flags alarm at some level. Boswick is positioned behind a balloon-rendered dog, obviously alluding to the enormous sculptures by Jeff Koons (b.1965) and food still appears, now as a slice of watermelon on the far right. But the distance from animal to edible is more to the point. Separating them is an enormous cactus, carefully detailing each spine, an ingenious protection seemingly minor but painful to closer relations... Again in the absence of a female figure, a surrogate is perhaps suggested.
‘Transparent Moon’s Golden Juices’ (2024) 138 X 91 cm mixed media on canvas
Finally, something of an anomaly to the show is ‘Transparent Moon’s Golden Juices’ (2024) heavily reworked, with a more figurative background and absence of animals, concentrating on just a stylised lemon and juicer in an evening setting beneath a lemon tree. The folk song Lemon Tree probably carries much of the sentiment, concerning deceptive appearances, drawbacks to a closer relationship, the usual stuff. A surprising graphic element is found in the profile for a frame moulding, its curves echoing fruit, its placement in the upper left deftly suggesting a lit doorway with silhouetted figure, elsewhere the shape ‘frames’ the lemon and juicer, integrates them with the background. It is an elegant and effective note on which to exit the show.
