Jesse Darling: Enclosures
Camden Art Centre, 13 May - 26 June 2022
Next time you're in the area, visit St Paul's Church, Stoke Newington High Street, go into the churchyard, and take a walk into the labyrinth. Its stone boundaries are set into the grass in a circular shape with a path that leads inside, twisting and turning until it delivers you to the centre. The motions of the mind parallel those of the body: you progress deeper into yourself until, standing at the centre of the labyrinth, the two converge and you can access the innermost point of your being.
Then head a couple of boroughs to the west, where Jesse Darling's installation at Camden Art Centre, Enclosures, provides the opportunity for a related exercise. Lines of bricks are laid across the floor, directing your motion through the single-room installation. The bricks form the plan of a house, and as you move through it you encounter objects that act as symbols of the institutions of a conventional life: broken dolls, office blinds, a child harness, a miniature house with a picket fence. Make your way through this life.
At the end of the room two ruined columns, with bent rebar poking out from the top, form an arch, with a camera hanging overhead. Its footage is played, live, on a TV screen beyond the arch. You see yourself approaching on the screen, but once you've passed between the columns, you're out of shot. Suspended over the arch is a coil of barbed wire and the kind of lacy, white tablecloth that you see in churches. It's an iconography of death: desolate, authoritative, triumphant, with an ecclesiastical finish.
Standing still at this point beyond the camera, the end - though not the centre - of Darling's labyrinth, you're aware less of internal detachment than external indifference. You're gone, but you watch other people circulating around the room just as you did, simulating a life over which no-one has meaningful control. Enclosures isn't about inward spiritual progress so much as a citizen's material and social passage through this world, and their reproduction of its forms. Instead of tranquility, it produces claustrophobia.
Beyond the low brick boundary are objects that supply alternating moments of humour and horror. There is a glass-fronted display cabinet with six old hammers wrapped in colourful ribbons and bells. Break glass in case of emergency. Listen to their tinkle as you beat helplessly at the unbending walls that keep you in.
A crowd of clay hands grasp and smear a white-tiled wall, as if desperately trying to claw their way out. Or claw their way in? This makes a real difference. If the hands are fighting to enter, then they seem to acknowledge that the kind of life sketched in this installation - house, job, kids - is for many people not the object of horror, but of envy. That would edge the bleak tone of the show into outright cruelty. We're trapped in a violent existence - or we're trapped trying to gain it. Now take a moment and reflect on the better metaphor for your life. Are you making your way through St Paul's labyrinth, or Jesse Darling's?