The Gift of Shit
If one of Bluebeard’s eight wives had trusted the old murderer, and left the bloody chamber well alone, would the couple have lived into comfortable old age? If Psyche had not doubted the love of Cupid, shining light on him as he slept, would the potential of their love have remained unrealised? Both stories address the issues of love, trust and darkness with very different consequences.
The narrator of the One Thousand and One Nights tells her stories at night in order to delay her execution. The story of Scheherazade… exemplifies the power of narrative (and all art) to suspend time, and ultimately defy death.
Referring particularly to the tradition of narrative in 19th century British paintings, Moreton explores these stories, whilst investigating the construction of an alternative narrative space, in her third solo exhibition at the gallery.
In The Gift of Shit a young medieval style page, transported from a Pre-Raphaelite painting, presents a dish of excrement as if a gift. The painting puts a cheerful, self-help spin on the moralising of the Pre-Raphaelites, In Mary Anne, Millais’ waiting heroine has completely lost her propriety is undergoing a personal sexual revolution. In the complex painting The Art of Revelation the painter takes the place of Scheherazade, painting her story with the brush. The part of the listening Bluebeard is taken by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who also recognised the value of a good story. But, rather than revealing herself in her work, the painter’s nakedness is hidden by it.
Moreton will also exhibit painted drawings on wood, portraits of women she admires; many of them story-tellers, who have also come out of the dark. Grouped together under the title ‘Absent Friends’, they include the English writers Rebecca West and Elizabeth Jane Howard (who died at the beginning of this year), the American crime writer Patricia Highsmith, and American singer/songwriters Karen Dalton and Aretha Franklin. They form a positive modern counterpoint to the voiceless victims in Bluebeard’s Castle.
Nicky Hodge - from A Coruscating Eye 2014