Annie Markovich
Artist Nicola Bealing presents underwater creatures crafted from salvaged or recycled materials in the upper gallery, filling the room with curious, delightful sea plants and animals suspended from the ceiling. Dead Man’s Fingers’ colorful name suggests grotesque images. I was dead wrong. Bealing developed the paintings over 10 years and captured the mysterious chaos of nature now in the midst of environmental apocalypse.
Sharing the upper gallery with the sculptures, are four surreal underwater plant images, painted during lockdown, each taking center stage as meticulously painted portraits reminiscent of H. Bosch’s “Gardens of Earthly Delights” in their intricate detailing of seaweed shapes. The themes vary from super realistic depictions of what Bealing calls, Dead- Man’s Fingers, Fans and Ears that can hear the Sea. Superreal or surreal the sheer magnitude of work overwhelms the gallery’s four walls.
Downstairs In the lower gallery, Sea Series, unlike the upstairs fanciful sea garden, Bealing alerts how environmental degradation equates human horror. In Swallow Dive a ghostlike figure dives into a sardine packed body of floating heads. The Sea World is black darkness, ominous and horrible. Another underwater decapitated figure with fishhooks pulling his flesh in green water lurches through the water, helpless. A man with a bulbous red faced head stands in water called “Jellied”. Underneath jellyfish bubbles and pollution above, his head looks out at yellow molten sky.
Don’t miss Man on Fire whose body is submerged in a black sea. His head is on fire and boils cover his body. The unifying element in this series of oil paintings is the compositional structure where the upper third of the painting is usually horizontal, with or without heads. City Man is hard to find midst a tangled brown blob. Bealing painted her subconscious fear and many of these works of art are not pleasing to look at. The significance of Bealing’s work lies in its clarion call to heed the damage and to look, see and hear what the Sea is telling us. Thankfully the show has been up from May until November.
Nicola Bealing: Sea and Dead-Man’s Fingers
04 May — 02 Nov 2024, Newlyn Art Gallery Penzance