Solo Exhibition – New Greenham Arts

Some work below from my Morphosis Series that I will be showing:

It is natural for an artist’s work to experience a sort of evolution growing from one medium to another, its theoretical and creative specificities developing and changing. The work of Kenyan-born British artist stay Mehta (b.1954) is now going through a significant mutation both in terms of aesthetics and content. Currently oscillating between painting digital photography, film animation, and sculpture, the work nonetheless retains a powerful link to Mehta’s dominant subject-matter: the biological mysteries of human life. The new work healthily incorporates what came before it, and there is no brutal jettisoning with the old in favour of the redemptive new. In a prior evolutionary stage, Mehta’s work had developed from instances of pure figuration to abstracted portrayals of the human figure, and the more recent growth has made use of these middle period paintings as the paint basis for the new digital work, the ‘morpho projections’.

Mehta holds a fascination for the fundamental importance of elements such as DNA, RNA and human growth hormones, using them as symbols and abstract patterns in her paintings. In contrast to the candy coloured geometric shapes representing cells and elements ate the transparent splashes and amorphous matrix in which they float.

Mehta’s use of initials of amino acid‘s cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine  (CGAT), abstract concepts recombined at will to produce individuality contrasts with the more suggestive and evocative tactile substances, the fluids and sera of primordial matter. Floating in the matrix, the elements of human life rearrange themselves to compose an aestheticised version of life itself.

In dissecting human life down to these elemental building blocks, why does Mehta stop at amino acids and hormones? Why not pursue the thread and go all the way down, down, down to atomic, sub-atomic, quarkian physics? The answer lies in the difference between being and living. While atoms maybe the particles responsible for our being, DNA and hormones are those that determine our being. They control and make up, our physicality and personality, and are apt representatives of that most creative of phenomena: differentiation.

Looming behind the primary colours of the biological material is a series of faces. Always the same; a generic, racially indeterminate, asexual face: it is the result of repeated tracing, erasure and redrafting. Paradoxically, it has faded into existence over time and practice: an archetypal sketch, no more than a simple series of lines resolving itself into a face, universally recognisable and recognisably universal. And in the photographic work, the already multiple faces and primordial shapes are superimposed on other canvases, depicting related bodies and sell components, resulting in ‘morpho-projections‘ that bear a  familiar relation to the constituent parts. The final work evolves as a composite body, a substantial, material canvas supplemented by any ethereal, spiritual projection, a sort of delete distillation of the original paintings. And in this, the new works mirror the construction of self: a spiritual web overlaying and bodily structure.

Ellen Mara de Wachter

15.10.04