Camilla Bliss: Lying in a Grape

8 December 2021 – 18 February 2022

theCoLAB is pleased to present the Royal College of Art/Yorkshire Sculpture Park Graduate Award 2021 winner’s exhibition: Camilla Bliss’s Lying in a Grape. The exhibition is presented in the context of the half-acre raised space above Temple tube station, between the Strand and the Thames, that is the Artist’s Garden, a space for contemporary sculptural interventions, recently transformed by Lakwena’s vibrant vision of Paradise, Back in the Air:  a Meditation on Higher Ground.  

The exhibition’s title is taken from ‘A Sketch of the Past’, one of Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical essays, written in 1939 and posthumously published as Moments of Being.  Woolf describes ‘moments of being’ as points in time that one experiences a sense of reality, as opposed to the states of ‘non-being’ that dominate most of our conscious life.  Bliss’s works articulate and encapsulate both being and non-being through their evocative nature on the one hand and her manipulation of materials on the other. 

Visible from the Strand, a monumental pink vessel stands above a grey parapet.  With the grey backdrop of wintery skies, the churning and breeze block plinths, Marshmallow Dew, and its more squat, orange counterpart, Fingery Eyes, rise up proudly from the dazzling floorscape.  They are approachable, inviting an embrace.  On closer inspection, they are looking out through small faces embedded in their impasto surface. The faces are familiar, they have been drawn from folkloric and mythical motifs repeated across millennia and across cultures offering visual doors to understanding the world through a spiritual lens.  The sculptures are ‘guardians’ standing between the two states of being.   Their form and colour are evocative of Graeco-Roman amphorae, used both for storing the food of the living and the ashes of the dead.  The back and forth between these two states evoke the tidal Thames with its two high and two low tides a day, the river into which all the rivers surrounding it flow, out to the North Sea and the ocean.  This rhythm pervades Bliss’s work, flowing into the vessels and out for ritual cleansing of mind and body. 

Their surface makes one think of sugary icing or frothy waves, their irregularity and imperfection are comforting: their materiality is strident.  Bliss is catholic about materials that can be manipulated, carved, cast or blown; but she does not seek to simply master them.  She prefers to retain a spontaneous and receptive relationship to the making process to allow the material to keep its voice.  Making the form of the large-scale vessels was a physically demanding ‘dance’, with the tempo raised as she completed the quick drying surface, forcing her to work intuitively, in ‘non-being’ mode.  She likens the movement of hand on surface of her work to the newly learned but now unconscious swiping across the screens of our phones that fills our days.  The surface she has created entices us into its depths in the same way we are sucked into the timeless digital world through the surface of our phone.  

From the vastness of the outside space into the hut, where Bliss invites us to experience Woolf’s ‘lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow’.  Altering our perception as light streams through the window from the south, six green bottles float on constantly moving light, trapped inside the bottles and dancing freely on the walls outside them.   Faces emerge and submerge and we lose ourselves in a non-being state of contemplation.  Her first foray into glass, Bliss enjoyed relinquishing control to the meditative, controlled exhalation that defines the mouth-blown forms.  Breath is a vital part of the work: the act of breathing out extends our being beyond the body, and echoes the natural movement of the tides.  

On leaving the hut, a playful smiling ceramic face above the door work asks us to stay a while in the realm of the ‘unknown/unknown’.  Perhaps most importantly, all of Bliss’s work asks us to enjoy this, our soul’s space, freely and without gloom.  

Find the exhibition Bibliography here.

About the RCA/YSP Graduate Award

Established in 2015, the RCA/YSP Graduate Award offers vital support at the critical transition stage from being a student to independent artist. This builds on YSP’s long-standing commitment to supporting artists at every stage of their career. The award is bespoke to each recipient and establishes long-term relationships and opportunities.  In 2021, Helen Pheby (YSP), Sarah Staton (RCA) and Claire Mander (theCoLAB) selected Camilla Bliss as recipient of the award. Previous awardees include: 2015 William Darrell; 2016 Hoyeon Kang; 2017 Marco Meiling; 2018 Tianyou Huang; 2019 Agostino Quaranta ; 2020 Michael Forbes.

 About Camilla Bliss

Camilla Bliss (b.1989, London) regularly draws on motifs found in historical craftsmanship, myth and folklore to communicate ideas about the modern world. She utilises a wide range of materials, placing an importance on the handmade and the sculptural, yet at the same time referencing our relationship to digital technology.  

Selected exhibitions include: London Grads Now. 21 | Saatchi Gallery, Swell (solo) at 87 Gallery, Hull, Fertile Laziness, Platform Southwark (2021); Window Project, Gazelli Art House, London, Dirty Hands & Revelations at Standpoint Gallery, London (2019); We See You, We Hear You at Hospital Club, London, Summer Exhibition at Royal Academy, London,Threads Salon at Turner Contemporary, Margate (2018) and Closed Curtain (solo) at Barbican Arts Group Trust, London (2017). She is a co- founder of artist-led curatorial project HAZE. 

 Exhibition

Open daily from dawn to dusk, free and open to all

The Artist’s Garden, Temple Station Roof Terrace, Temple Place, London WC2R 2PH

Tube:  Temple or Embankment; entry via the stairs on Temple Place, a few minutes’ walk from the Strand, next to Somerset House.