Leave the Dishes, Poke the Jelly
Solo Exhibition by Morwenna Kearsley at the CCA, Glasgow
Morwenna Kearsley’s exhibition at the CCA Leave the Dishes, Poke the Jelly welcomes us with pastel-coloured walls, their palette borrowed from a Battenberg cake. ‘I wanted colour on your eyeballs’, Kearsley describes the origin of her new body of work. And so, she summoned a ghost – the one of the American photographer Lee Miller, remembered for being the ‘muse’ of the surrealist Man Ray, as well as for her documentary photography during WWII, which covered the war in Normandy and the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps in Buchenwald and Dachau. Suffering PTSD after the war, Miller gave up on the medium and trained as a Cordon-Bleu chef; her cookbook was published posthumously in 2017.
Sundae for Lee Miller, collage made from c-type prints, 2020. Courtesy Morwenna Kearsley and Patrick Jameson.
Although Kearsley has been familiar with Miller’s work since the early 2000s – thanks to her mother, Anne Forte – it is Miller’s recipes that were the catalyst for this series. Yet, what was planned to be a documentation of the dishes, cooked by friend and artist Sofie Fischer-Rasmussen, became something rather different. ‘History takes a linear route, but when you pull history into an art project, the art refracts: these dishes became a catalyst to go somewhere else’, explains Kearsley in our zoom conversation. Instead of prettily arranged dishes, the exhibition shows 17 C-type prints of leftovers, scraps and general outtakes, with a distinct surrealist feel.
The choice of summoning a ghost was of course not completely uncalculated. Here, Kearsley refers to the practice of spirit photography, widespread in the 1850s, where photographers attempted to capture images of ghosts next to portrait sitters. The history of photography is something that Kearsley is very aware of. However, in this body of work, she is consciously drawing on a different lineage, focussing on what often remains unseen.
Clingfilm, C-type print, 2019. Courtesy Morwenna Kearsley and Patrick Jameson.
Still Life, C-Type print, 2019. Courtesy Morwenna Kearsley and Patrick Jameson.
Reflecting on Miller’s work, Kearsley connects the rituals present in both analog photography and cooking – the alchemy of smells, gadgets, timings. First trained as a photographer at Napier University, before completing an MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 2015, Kearsley has consistently been working with analog film, printing in the dark room at Stills, where she also teaches. Despite paying homage to Miller's work ‘the images are not a reflection of Lee’s life, but of our generation, our life, our health’. Although her Sundae was made for the ghost of Lee Miller, Leave the Dishes, Poke the Jelly is there for us all to digest.
Morwenna Kearsley’s exhibition Leave the Dishes, Poke the Jelly at the CCA, Glasgow is on view until 15 Nov 2020. Book your time slot on the CCA’s website.
Words: Polina Chizhova