Jesse Darling: Enclosures

At three points within the show, you are confronted quietly, sinisterly, by surveillance cameras and their live footage, some of which are tiny in scale. Whichever you see first, the camera or the footage, you go looking for the other half of the device, what it is recording, where, how? Trying to connect one thing to another, there were lots of things I couldn’t understand – a form of red writing on the wall of words I couldn’t interpret, tally lines totting up an unknown count, a gendering of objects whose purpose I wasn’t sure of, like lace curtains you’d find in a quintessentially British home or reverent parts of porcelain dolls, decorated and immobile hammers ready for labour but incapable of the job.  

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What I could see, or more accurately, sense, was how exquisitely responsive everything in the room was to the surrounding space. This sensitive navigation was nothing short of impressive; one of my most favourite things is when you can feel the spatial tensions of an artwork and its site like a dialogue hanging in the air. It was a course plot with mirroring and contrasting effects. The shape of the windows with their gridded panes was echoed by steel grids, which in turn, pulled on every line in the space, collecting shadowed lines, cabled lines, lined bricks, the lines of the radiator, made lines, found lines – all delineating the space and heightening the sense of enclosure. The gallery skirting that encircled the room was tugged into the conversation where Darling had made mimicking corners to form the bases of columns. A tiny section that I loved most was the exacting and elegant positioning of part of the work from Inter Alia I, where a rod of steel impaled a white curtain lace, fixing it in suspense.