How much of our communities are made of myth? When companies and cultures pave over reality, how can we excavate what lies underneath? From the spaces we inhabit to the items we consume, authoritative voices tell us to accept what we see on the surface. While the truth remains buried, the systems in our world remain out of balance. We need truth-tellers to bring these hidden stories into the light. Thankfully, Elisa Conlan, Esther Forse, and Lucie Benninghaus are illuminating reality in their upcoming group exhibition, House Lights.
At Whitespace Gallery, we’re invited into an artificial home assembled like a theatre set, blurring the lines between audience and stage. Here, the artists redirect their spotlights onto unseen truths in our natural environments, our synthetic neighbourhoods, and the cultural identities binding them together.
‘Looking is really difficult right now,’ Forse explains. ‘A lot of things are not just what they look like, and there is a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, so we’re inviting people to have a look behind, to look closer and harder.’
‘It’s about not taking the surface level for granted, but considering what could be behind it, even if it’s not real but imagined,’ Benninghaus adds.
Myth-making and myth-breaking reverberates between each artist’s body of work, developed over five years of study at Edinburgh College of Art. We confront their truths in a dense, immersive environment where the artwork appears like set pieces and props. ‘We’re definitely thinking about living rooms and homes, and how the gallery can be more welcoming and cosy,’ Forse says. ‘There’s going to be at least one armchair, and a bookcase.’
The interactive experience plays with reality in both the art and the surrounding theatre set. It’s designed to coax rather than force audiences into considering ideas beyond convention. Conlan’s oil paintings composed through collage examine how national images write and rewrite histories to serve political ideologies. Raised with their mother’s Russian culture, they merge the horrors of national conflicts with the childlike play of Slavic folklore.
‘I’ve been comparing emblems in fairy tales and folklore to historical photographs I find, contrasting early and modern ways of recounting history,’ Conlan says.
‘I grew up watching cartoons and reading picture books, and I always return to Baba Yaga. I’m reimagining and playing with the imagery of her forest, for example, to reflect on the staged nature of historical narratives and what’s left out of the picture frame.’
Forse attempts to unearth these ideological values in meticulous oil-based detail. Her facsimiles of model villages, photographed for vintage postcards, reflect a mythical vision of British life – quaint, antiquated, and unspoiled. Yet barbed wire fencing closes off the streets and fire catches inside empty houses. This utopian ideal may be more corrupt than we realise.
‘The politics are evident in what you think an ideal society looks like – how you build it, how you imagine it through imagery like model villages, film sets, theatres,’ she says. ‘Particularly with this country, there’s a ‘Merry Old England’ fetishisation of a particular kind of place. A lot of the model villages cherry pick history and cannibalise the past to create the vision they want to present.’
Connecting with the raw beauty already around us, Benninghaus’s scavenged materials form sculptures that morph and decompose over time. From scrap metal to textiles gathered at ECA workshops, they allow materials to guide the shape of their sculptures.
‘Clay I collect myself, and I’m working with wool from small-scale sheep farmers in the UK,’ they say. ‘I’m using some alpaca wool from an alpaca I actually met at Birkill House. It’s called Pepper.’
‘There’s this idea that you can create art and your materials don’t matter, even if the cost of the artwork is environmental. Quite often we use polyester and plastic and resin casting, and it will fall apart after a decade or two. So, I’m interested in the potential for my sculptures to fall apart and decompose, or be recycled or end up somewhere else.’
As we discover the shapeshifting potential of waste, the exhibition’s creative workshops invite us to construct an afterlife for these disposable materials. Benninghaus’ Plastic Waste Sculpture Workshop turns single-use plastic into an artistic medium, reframing how we can use and reuse this long-lasting resource.
As foragers of second-hand materials, Scavenger Collective will also host their first workshop of the year after a recent brand revamp. While exploring the past lives of repurposed waste, Coordinator Delan Aribigbola says the organisation will shift to educate the public through workshops, journals and physical artifacts.
‘We think there’s something really powerful in teaching concepts that are often intellectually gatekept and breaking them down into easily digestible workshops, written articles or designed items,’ he says. ‘By relating them to everyday objects and processes, we think it allows the public to become active consumers in their everyday life.’
Facilitated by Matilda Bull, Reuse Workshop asks us to revisit and recreate places from our past using recycled packaging and Tetra Paks. The emerging prints will construct a collaborative ‘Memory Town’. ‘Memory can form new truths that are separate from the moment in which we are remembering,’ Bull says.
‘Certain aspects are exaggerated and amplified, others completely omitted, based on what holds emotional significance to us. So, we become an unreliable narrator in our own story. The workshop aims to confront this head on, allowing unreliability to take physical form through the Memory Town.’
The real and the imagined, the natural and the unnatural – we can’t have one without the other. Intertwined under our feet, House Lights asks us how these root systems can support our communities rather than destabilise.
House Lights will exhibit at Whitespace Gallery, Edinburgh, from 8th till 12th March, 11am–6pm, with an opening event on 7th March at 7pm
