Lucy Jane Turpin - Burning To Change

05.08.23 - 26.08.23
Solo Exhibition at
Kalashnikovv Gallery,
Johannesburg

Exhibition Statement

“In a museum of marble faces,
a statue of a woman.
Streaks leak from her eyes and down her cheeks.
Her ancient weathering, a symbol for contemporary melancholia. She lures.

They say that she is likely Aphrodite.

Not all those thrown into the fire have enough water left in them to echo.

On trains, buses, and aeroplanes
bodies surrender to their mechanics under the spell of sleep.
The heartbeat, the breath, the head slack upon its neck;
defenceless against the stranger’s gaze, the imagination of the awake.
To witness strangers sleeping is to steal intimacy from beneath its own sheets.
What is a body but a shrine for rest.

Like the caterpillar, the viewer must forfeit their sight if their eyes are to transform.
Is this why butterflies emerge from the dark,
a second set of eyes painted on their wings?
Maybe to be in-between is to be in-exchange with the self.

Perhaps metamorphosis is just a queering of one’s own vision.

Form was not born from an idea, it was an idea vanishing *1

If presented with the choice of possessing the wound or the scar, which does one choose to embody?
It depends, perhaps, which memory one can stand to live with more; the image or its story.

Lividity
Sometimes bright blue crystals develop. Vivianite
The body’s final attempt at beauty.

Even pleasure herself longs to be witnessed in her torment.

Madness protects, as fever does *2

What if the pain of being moved by an image is not so much the pain of beauty but the pain of touching the boundaries of it;
the irretrievable truths that roam just outside.
The fear of the ending of an echo.

When the heart grows old, does it lose its colour too?
Once the red has faded, is this when it washes up on the shore of its birth.
Pale tentacles still twitching,
a hint of blue.

By Robyn Perros