The construction of images has been a long-standing preoccupation of artist Sian Costello. Hymn to Him is a guilty pleasure, a sustained glance at the relationship between the unstable and convoluted lives of artists and the composed stillness of the characters they create.
In her painting and photographic work, she lingers on the surfaces of things — bellies, primroses, vegetables. Costello inserts herself into her compositions and, as her own model, she remains in control of both sides of the canvas. Her paintings are less representative of their classical subjects — portraiture, nudes, and still life — but more about grappling with the dichotomy of fact and fiction within the artist’s desire to create new realities and the desperation to represent her own.
Methods of photography are present in Costello’s practice through her regular use of camera obscura to create her images for painting. For this new body of work, Costello takes a specific moment at the birth of photography as her jumping off point, a moment in which the history of contemporary art was at a crossroads. Costello’s interest in this period lies in the ways that practitioners were split in two camps; those who believed that photography’s realism was the key to legitimacy, and those who saw it as an opportunity to enhance the artist’s hand.
The former documented real-life people and events to fill a gap in accurate representation, while the latter staged their subjects in the language of academic painting where the viewer is left wondering what is a brushstroke and what is light upon a sheet of film.
Through painting, installation, and film, Costello aims to take the viewer on a loop around the history of figuration and the hierarchies of authorship. This body of work presents multiple mediums of human representation and mimicry, not as a linear progression from worst to best, but as a web of impulses, predicated upon varying motives.
Speaking to ideas of desire, desperation, and control, this exhibition takes its title from a song in the final act of Lerner and Loewes’s 1956 Broadway musical My Fair Lady, based on the novel Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. In this adaptation of a Grecian myth where an artist falls hopelessly in love with his creation, the second act sees a 1950s revisionist ending where the ‘creation’ eventually succumbs to her creator. In using herself as her own model, Costello could be seen as engaging in a radical act of self-love, but in actuality is confronting the reality of living as a socially-awkward portrait painter.
Hymn to Him is curated by Niamh Brown.