Hannah Kate Absalom

Absalom’s practice is an investigation into the infiltration of Judeo-Christian dogma, mythology and iconography upon Western art, and its fundamental influence on the aesthetics of the grotesque and the horror genre, particularly in 20th century cinema.

/ HYPNAGOGIA / is a collection of artwork spanning the medias of oil painting, short films, woodcuts drawings and collages made in the artists graduating year. The triptych of oil paintings featured present a classical yet surreal interpretation of apocalyptic dystopias within the framework of contemporary social, political and environmental concerns. The paintings within the triptych, / ONLYSALT AND SULPHUR LEFT IN PERGAMUM / , / THE FORCED FRUITS OF TIPHSAH / and /GOD DOESN’T WHISPER HE SCREAMS/, draw on recognisable Biblical imagery, such as the presence of the icon, the loaded symbology of the fruit tree, and gestural religious performativity. However, the paintings also utilise the theory of collective thought, in which particular images are shared across history, geography, culture, and religion, perhaps with varying individual meanings, yet invoking an astounding emotional response across the board. This collective synchronicity often operates in much more subtle, but frequently identifiable forms, such as the symbolism and semantics of body gestures, shapes, colours, abstract words and sounds, which, in their essence are meaningless, yet have been adopted into the shared ritual of human society since ancient times.

When installed, the triptych aims to operate as an altar piece, the recognisable architecture of spaces of worship being reflective of the trinity. The artworks aim to overwhelm the senses; their shared colour palette is over saturated, dense, and confusing to a modern readership due to its Byzantine-inspired use of flat space, in stark contrast to the Flemish Primitive representation of the figure. The characters present within the artworks are without identity, apocalyptic prophets of sort, like Dickensian ghosts, bearing warning upon their audience without the judgement of didacticism often present within religion. The characters are figureheads, icons, representative rather than reflective, anachronistic within every setting you place them in. The void which these figures present, alongside the manipulative form of flatness and surrealism catalyses the Freudian idea of the uncanny in the mind of the viewer. Through Absalom’s artwork and academic writings, the fetishisation of the uncanny, the grotesque and suffering, is found to be fundamental to the Christian faith, and so an enjoyment in the horror of the paintings presented is allowed, if not actively encouraged by the artist.

The writings of Slavoj Zizek have been a central interest to the artist, the following quotation being a particular favourite with reference to the importance of ritual and collective myth within the mind of humanity:

‘the whole secret of mysticism is this: that Man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid…the one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the Sun at noon day, mysticism explains everything else by the place of its own victorious invisibility’.