Siobhan Liddell

The works in Siobhan Liddell’s exhibition “Been and Gone” are assemblages drawn from the artist’s subconscious. Sourced from recollections of trips around the United Kingdom, as well as time spent in New York, they began as landscape paintings rendered in muted pastels and blurred ever so slightly, as though seen through the fog of memory. Small ceramic appendages resembling familiar objects like cups, leaves, or berries protrude from many of the surfaces, often secured to the canvas with thin lengths of wire. The ceramic mushrooms and screws in In a Paper Bag (all works cited, 2022) dangle in front of a slightly abstracted painting of a paper bag. Here, pigment and clay are not united (as they are in the hand and mug of the nearby Between Worlds), but neither do they stand in opposition to each other. Rather, the ceramics seem to hover just above the canvas, refusing to be pinned down by Liddell’s brush. 

For Timelessness and Transience, Liddell pairs a delicate impression of the Isle of Skye with a ceramic cigarette. The subtle eeriness of this phantasmagorical presentation of a domestic object recalls Robert Gober’s sinks and doors, which Liddell helped fabricate during her time as Gober’s studio assistant in the 1990s. In his 2016 book, The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher noted what many a German speaker will tell you: that Freud’s notion of the uncanny—“das Unheimliche”— is far better translated as “unhomely,” which articulates the notion of a recognizable yet threatening presence within the domestic sphere. Liddell’s works are unhomely in this literal sense. Her landscapes are sparse yet intimate, their uncanniness emerging from their disjunction of familiarity and foreignness: the sense that the household subject yields a deep and specific comfort for its creator that is nevertheless inaccessible for an external observer.