Unnamed Saints marks the culmination of work and research begun during her time as Bridget Riley Fellow at the British School Rome (2021/22) and coincides with her residency at St John’s College Oxford.
Smithson’s focus is on the contradictions that link health, ritual, theology, divine and political power; how these have and continue to shape the human condition. The exhibition is comprised of two parts, a central film work anchored by a reworking of her installation ‘Detritus’, originally formulated in Rome, along with prints and drawings that also feature in the film.
Anatomical votives and relics have long been imagined as able to transfer illness or sin between human and divine objects or remains, especially in times of plague and pandemic. Symbolic limbs and organs created during Etruscan and Roman periods might be thought of as an early reference to the idea of cloning body parts, Smithson suggests. Her representation of the fragmented body also refers to how minds and bodies are divided by the specialisations of medicine; the human treated as parts rather than a whole.
Entering the gallery, the installation of drawings appears to spill out of the walls and grow in fragments across the ground. They offer a petri-dish view of “unswept floors” and what might have littered them over time. Shaped like animal skins, they bear evidence of all manner of historically loaded and scattered remnants: relics, gilded bones, walnuts, bodily traces. Ribbons appear to wrap themselves around bones like the banderoles found in Medieval and Renaissance paintings used to communicate silent speech or prayer.
The film imagines a dead saint’s return to Earth to find her body “scattered, torn apart, spread so thin, untraceable”. She lists all the ways it has been erased – endlessly replicated, worshipped and desecrated – her voice travelling through different periods and locations in Italy’s history. Reliquaries, often bodily remains enshrined in precious metals, are also perceived as having the power of speech. Here, Smithson’s fictional channelling of their “voices”, echoing down the line of time, reminds us of the deep historical roots of the saints’ magnetic hold on humanity.
Coleman Projects, 94 Webster Road, Bermondsey, London, SE16 4DF from May 6th to June 4th. Times: Fri – Sun 12 – 6 pm.
