Spirit Faces

Olsen Gruin

New York, 2018

Essay

Oliver Watts

Once after dinner Anna-Wili Highfield took up her napkin and, in a few practiced gestures, laid a linen horse’s head tenderly on the table. All of her work has this ease and friendliness, like tokens of goodwill between her and the viewer. Highfield is an animalier, she has for some time created an exceedingly well observed and realistic paper menagerie. Taking this everyday, commonplace material, with a few studied tears and cuts, and sewn together often with thin tendrils of cotton thread, sometimes painted with watercolour, the animals are fragile yet strongly present. They reach out to the viewer like magical totem animals, finding some sort of sympathy through shared vulnerability.

In this body of work there is a sustained move towards more traditional sculptural materials: brass, pearl, wood. However the works still resist the heroic and the permanent. The work is not shy, but doesn’t exclaim, it wants you to come closer to it and explore in a collaborative effort; the works remain playful and open ended. In Transmission 2 for example a breast is conjured quickly through a curved piece of brass, painted white and pink, conjoined with a similarly curved found shell. In a joyful move, a squirt of milk, like some baroque Madonna Lactans, is represented by a pearl atop a whitened brass rod.

Even with these more permanent materials, with their hard edges, Highfield manages to retain the feeling that the work comes in to being easily and could equally fall apart. It feels in a way underdone like a dream. In the shift from scissors to tin snips, Highfield has had to innovate a language which makes brass seem soft and malleable. One strategy used in Transmission 2 is a spray of white paint, with a pink blush, that on one hand fades out the brass, dematerialising it, and at the same time unifies everything (while not wholly coalescing). The wire armature also shows the workings of the structure never letting it become too complete. Highfield’s work always has the immediacy of the maquette.

The other big change in the work is the more obvious presence of the human body and gesture as a subject. Perhaps Falcon is the intermediary work, with the gauntleted hand of the falconer calling for the falcon to land. Highfield’s animals seem always in the end to be deeply connected to her. They are if not self portraits at least some sort of stand-in. The image represents something of her own spiritual life or for others maybe her psychological state. In this exhibition though Highfield has confronted the portrait head-on, not through proxy. Her work Self-portrait as Naturalist, depicts the artist as a beast conjurer and mad scholar, in some sort of steam punk mash up of Disney’s Snow White and a post-human Beatrix Potter. The sculptural material demands to be seen as beautiful and tangible (the ebony and shell eyes for example) but something here is worrying and odd. Highfield seems unable to hold on to the image of herself in this bust, usually the most stolid of genres. It depicts her instead as fragile and humbled, as she falls apart and flits away like a bird.

The airiness of the works suggests the dreamlike quality of the Symbolists and their more famous legacy, the Surrealists. Odilon Redon is full of strange animal/men, Camille Claudel is full of feminine longing and sexuality, and perhaps most famously

Edvard Munch created images that were in between the real and the fantastical. It was the Symbolists who allowed the material (or words in poetry) to speak and resonate for themselves beyond the common and rational syntax of things. In Highfields work the pearl or the ebony resonates beyond the work itself. The shell has its own history, its own story that pushes laterally, though still connected, to the image it represents. So for example in Goat, the human hair is an amazing analogue for the goats fur but it is also a voodoo charm, or memento. All of Highfields materials from paper to gold demand to be seen for themelves; they seem to resist their sculptural use.

The Symbolists also began primarily from the abstract, the spiritual and psychological and then sought out an image or a poem that could conjure that feeling in their viewer. I feel Highfield’s work, especially in this exhibition, functions in that way; her animals are emotional states, affirmations of power and resilience, of seduction and vulnerability, that we can all relate to.

As sculptural works this show is characterised by a contemporary hybridity. Highfield has been very interested in the anthropology of objects and various fetishes and totems from different periods. She likes the magic in objects and although in a gallery setting her works lead as sculptures they also allude to different forms, from religious icons to mourning jewellery, from portrait busts to kitsch souvenirs. For example Lion, with its pink finger between its teeth, and its feather boa halo, is confusingly part baroque reliquary, part rocker chic. In most of Highfields sculpture it is life size, as if her work becomes an effigy, a second body, or voodoo doll of thing she represents. I note that there is not much above life size, the size of authority and power; here everything is in direct conversation with the viewer as an equal.

There is something magical about watching Highfield work in her studio, there is almost something of the coven about it. As she takes shells, and drills eye holes and places her own daughters hair on an image of a goat, you feel like she is in the work of conjuring. Part modern constructivism, part futurism, part steam punk and surreal, it is very hard to pin down Highfield’s approach. We seem to be at the aftermath of a party with spattered paint, and streamers, feather boas draped over furniture and stained sheets. Although a modernist cliché, it is clear these works are genuinely deeply connected to Highfield’s life, bot hpsychological and material. Although based in her identity, there is however, a lot of poetry for the audience to find.