Caput Mortuum

Exhibition open Wed – Sun (11am – 5pm)

Caput Mortuum presents some of Flore Gardner’s most recent drawings, centred around existential themes of freedom, madness, and death (mixed in with a dose of black humour).

Gardner’s practice is all about drawing; it is fragile, subversive, experimental, intimate and immediate, and can be done everywhere, all the time. Every day since 2016, parallel to her daily work, Gardner has made one drawing in hidden notebooks. Apart from the commitment of drawing everyday, these sketches constitute a reservoir of ideas for further drawings, made through processes of expansion, translation and repetition.

Using a semi-automatic technique oscillating between compulsion and intention, recurring motifs appear – human bodies gone a bit awry, plants, machines, other living creatures, all doing strange things in pictures that suggest a lurking madness. These are ‘inscapes’, and they do not look like anything seen.

Gardner’s recent uncanny experience of visiting the Chauvet caves – the deeply, strangely familiar sense of the drawings despite their extreme temporal remoteness – pushed her to work on a bigger format and to attempt to make a work that speaks of our human ‘bareness’.

Made especially for the show, the large (5x3m) drawing entitled Caput Mortuum (I Was Dead But the Pictures Would Remain) consists of 4 panels, Birth, Life, Death and Decay or The Eternal Return, which work in a cyclic composition. Made with dark coloured etching ink, referencing the colour caput mortuum (a dark purple-brown originally made from the residue of an alchemical operation), these colours also evoke the dark inside of our minds and our bodies.

“Ultimately I aim to equate art with life through ‘creative resistance’ : a slowly but surely way of defying the everyday through a creative act. For me this takes the form of “(with)drawing”: retreating from the pattens of ordinary life as an oblique form of subversion”

– Flore Gardner

In Vitro Residency

This exhibition is presented as a result of the In Vitro Residency, a collaboration between Summerhall Arts and Huge Burge Foundation, made possible by funding from Creative Scotland.