Daemon & Saudade Colleen Schindler-Lynch • Thames Art Gallery

Life After : After Life

CHARLENE K. LAU on Daemon & Saudade

In Giacomo Leopardi’s Dialogue Between Fashion and Death (1824), Fashion is Death’s sister; both are children of Caducità — Frailty or Transience. While Leopardi’s jocular dialogue is intended to inspire a rather damning view of fashion and its fleeting nature, death and destruction bring the opportunity for change and re(birth) in a life after. This theme of life in and after loss runs through the works in Daemon and Saudade, where various facets of grief and mourning are articulated in wearable sculpture and portraiture. Together, the objects function as a collection of memento mori recording aftermaths and meditations on life, love, loss, and their messy realities. Punctuated by memory, Schindler-Lynch’s works speak to fragility and tenuousness, yet simultaneously how these states can be met with resilience. They ruminate on the mutability of the body, human relationships, and the tension and protension between love and trauma. Each object serves as an individual portrait of such grappling, whether understood in the traditional sense of portraiture—a photographic or painted image of a figure—or more abstractly as a snapshot of Being-in-the-world. A universal sense of Being-in-the-world is reflected in the titles Schindler-Lynch has chosen for her works, many of which borrow phrases from across cultures. Whether Thai, Chinese, West African or Russian, each culture wrestles with putting a name to the multitudinous dimensions of the human condition.

As a medium and protective shell or second skin, sartorial fashion takes on the spectral form of a human body. How we dress and craft ourselves is often closely tied to our core identity, where garments can be easily shed, replaced or discarded according to deeply held beliefs. It is this aspect of the inner being worn on the outside that Schindler-Lynch examines in her garments and accessories. In Xinteng, a Chinese term that can loosely be translated as heart-aching love, the embroidered patches of words including baffled, anxious, bile, avoid and cry speak to the diverse emotions Schindler-Lynch endured with the illness and death of her father. Derived from her journal entries, the words externalize private pain normally felt and not seen. Schindler-Lynch describes this visual effect of the appliqués as scabbing—bloody-looking, their edges unfinished and fraying, their script gothic and abrasive like a heavy metal typeface—which can be likened to rituals of tattooing and scarification. Such aesthetics of injury bring about feelings of disgust and repulsion, their biological evocations physically discomforting, like a re-enacted duller pain. The raised material surfaces also indicate an excess and cellular regeneration: past trauma(s) and a covering over, while perpetuating the idiom that “time heals all wounds.” Whatever its effect, the saying bears some truth, where emotional, mental and physical hurt leave indelible marks on one’s person. After loss and the grief that follows, we are forever altered in mind and body, reformulated, readjusted for this new world of the “without.”

The physical manifestation of pain in Xinteng oozes out of the shift dress form, its simple silhouette made messy, complicated and grotesque. Using the compound thiourea dioxide, Schindler-Lynch has, as she calls it, “discharged” the colour from the skirt portion, draining it of its darkness and “recharging” it with an oxblood hue.

You Can’t Unring the Bell is a platinum velvet shift dress featuring eight concentric semicircles of the phrase “shut up” laser etched around the collar. Four sections of silver hair extensions appear to emerge from the surface of the velvet; two segments flow from the left hip, while two more appear to spill from under the right breast. The back of the dress features an etched, thick vertebrae-like column of the phrase “MeToo” running down the spine. Although Schindler-Lynch conceptualized the garment before the popularization of the #MeToo movement, it now speaks uncannily to the contemporary awareness of sexual assault and harassment, and the collective trauma that remains. Like lesions, the words are imprinted onto the velvet, literally burned through the cloth. Visibly scarring the fabric’s epidermis, the letters reveal ochre backing underneath, at points destroying its structural integrity altogether.

In these works, the use of human hair and its displacement onto garment surfaces speaks to another type of loss: for Schindler-Lynch, her own hair lost after chemotherapy treatment for cancer. Having or not having hair is inextricably bound up in contradictions of health versus sickness, and life versus death. While hair signifies health and strength, hairlessness connotes illness and weakness. Despite this, hair has no life in it, but is rather made from death, that is, from cells that are no longer of use. Yet, we give life to hair: washing it, cutting it, styling it, replacing it where it was once lost. In this way, hair is given a life force after death.

When out of place, hair or fur recalls sickliness or unease as in Meret Oppenheim’s fur gloves, Pelzhandschuhe, and metal and fur bracelet (both 1936), Elsa Schiaparelli’s women’s boots adorned with cascading monkey fur (1938), BLESS’s Furwig (1996) and Hairbrush (1999), or even Martin Margiela’s wig coat (2009). The uncanniness of hair near but not attached to the body is strangely morbid, not dissimilar to the use of a loved one’s hair in Victorian mourning jewellery. Worn on the exterior, hair represents a type of non-verbal discomfort that is decorative yet intimate, flipping the inner turmoil outward into the world in an act of diffusion and release.

This inside-outside reversal is also evident in the laser-cut bracelets that constitute Suppressed Histories, externalizing innermost, obsessive thoughts. Each can be read as a meditation, a never-ending poem stuck in a loop, with each repetition providing some kind of alleviating function: “What the heart wants” reads one, while another is resigned to acceptance: “I have stupid moments where I forget that anything is wrong.” The inner supplants outer again in Black Heart Paillettes, in which over 60 miniature black hearts, etched and laser-cut from acrylic, fall like tiny grenades down the front of a white leather shift dress. Each paillette has a function similar to a badge of remembrance—reminiscent of Victorian Jet jewellery—a mark onto the garment-as-second-skin and the imagined body underneath. As do the “sash” of hair in Xinteng and jewellery pieces Well Worn, Worn Well and Rooster Pooster, this arrangement of hearts recalls formal military wear and creates a sort of body armour, a shield made visible, a protective shell against the world. Perhaps this device is most explicitly echoed in the work Hye Won Hye—a West African term for endurance—which takes the form of a Girl Guides or Boy Scouts sash, complete with embroidered badges of achievement in matters of the heart—badges that are earned through life’s tests, proudly worn and displayed.

The photographs in the exhibition point more directly to a portrayal of loss, putting faces to the name of grief. Taken from a Thai expression, When the hen sees the snake’s feet and the snake sees the hen’s boobs this series features four large, full-length, colour portraits of women neither in nor completely out of focus. The women have each experienced a type of grief, her pain specific and secret known only by the woman herself and another. With this in mind, a strangely indistinct and funereal aura hovers over the images. The portraits are a bit roughened and degraded; they give an impression of the well-worn, and seem to almost vibrate with the women’s weariness. Their tintype likenesses speak to a certain quality of preciousness—tintypes can be easily carried around in a jacket pocket or handbag—but also plays with their outsized proportions. Here, we can only offer empathy and compassion to these women, their sorrow the magnitude of which we do not know.

Set Aside is a triptych of black-and-white, digitally-aged, blurry photographs that feature a woman sitting on her heels and handling a package that represents a Pandora’s Box. In the first photograph, she is in midst of picking up a box on her right; in the central image, she holds the box carefully in front of her in quiet contemplation, perhaps testing its weight, unsure of how to handle its contents. In the third photograph, she turns to her left and is about to set the box down. In each part of the triptych, the box does not touch the floor. She holds onto it somewhat ambivalently, unable to let it go. As with When the Hen Sees the Snake’s Feet, the work is restrained and shrouded in secrecy, yet its melancholy is palpable.

In its many forms, grief is meant to be a transitory state, a process and path through to eventual healing. But how might it go on, and what happens when one is stuck in a purgatory of intense sorrow with no closure? Schindler-Lynch imagines a life beyond grief and how it also forever changes the fibre of our being. As the works in Daemon and Saudade express, complicated realities and sensations follow loss, laying bare inner lives in all of their complexity.

Charlene K. Lau is a New York-based art historian, art critic and cultural worker. Her writing has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, C Magazine, Canadian Art, Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, Fashion Theory, Journal of Curatorial Studies, and PUBLIC.

XO Skeleton: Impressions of grief have been recorded through journaling and depicted as an exoskeleton—a metaphorical outer layer extended beyond the body to protect the emotional state of the wearer. An exoskeleton is usually a hard, outer shell intended to physically protect its host, but here it is flimsy and ineffective. The laser-etched acetate is emblematic of protection while simultaneously revealing a struggle to camouflage emotion and maintain outward composure.

I Never Really Knew Mary Margaret: Referencing memorial keepsakes known as memento mori, and the tradition of preserving the hair of a loved one, the artist’s hair was woven into an embellished trim. Memorial adornments such as this contain the DNA of the owner — a single life lived and memories associated with an individual identity.

I don’t have many memories of my Aunt Mary Margaret except for her bright, thoroughly white hair. She was deaf, and so I have no memories of communication with her — just her shimmering halo of white. My father also had bright silvery white hair and passed on through DNA, so do I. I lost my hair during chemotherapy, and when it grew back, it was a similar shade to theirs, cementing a connection to a forbearer I never really knew.

Hye Won Hye: The machine-embroidered badges in this piece proudly display a series of personal symbols. A bandage across the broken yet otherwise common symbol of a woman may at first seem easy to decode, but the significance of these badges is tied together in a more complex way. Collectively they represent physical, mental and emotional endurance and being tough in the face of hardship. Wearing them proudly equates with the ritual in Girl Guides and Boy Scouts of passing a series of tests and earning badges as an outward public symbol of something you have survived. Hye won hye is a West African term that speaks to the tenacity and strength of an individual.

Toska: This miniature ceramic series is comprised of small devotional items that a person would wear or carry with them. These portable objects bear images of loved ones; they impart messages of comfort and affection and are intended to remind the wearer of someone’s absence. A nuance of the Russian term toska equates with a bruise on one’s soul. It refers to a state felt so deeply that it leaves a mark on an ephemeral part of us that has no tactile existence. Echoing a long history of painted ceramic miniatures, the pieces in Toska refer to devotional love and loss. A series of portraits are paired with the lover’s eye, a symbol of affairs of the heart. Popularized in the 19th century, this symbol communicated that the wearer’s heart was taken. The pearls speak of longevity, regret and loss, and their shape is evocative of tears. The cracked black heart embodies the Japanese practice of kintsugi, which acknowledges flaws and is about owning your unique history and seeing beauty even at the darkest of times.