INTERFACE
Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
REVIEW
David Miles: Forest
Part of ‘Press & Release’ exhibition
Phoenix Gallery, Brighton
26 April – 7 June
Reviewed by: Nancy Campbell
David Miles works extensively with paper, creating mobiles and cut-card works, and so an artist’s book is an almost inevitable development in his practice. Forest was produced for the exhibition ‘Papercuts’ at Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery in 2006; it accompanies and documents a large mobile of the same title. He explains that “the book is intended to echo the viewing experience of walking into the forest mobile, encountering situations and constructing narratives.”
Forest is a work that stands free of its origins, with a strong spatial presence and structural playfulness. As the green accordion-fold cover unwinds, the viewer is introduced to several layers die-cut with designs based on tree trunk silhouettes. A tension is created by this hide-and-seek path to the inner section, where it is apparent that all is not as it should be. Photographs (printed in near monochromatic green-black) reproduce painstakingly cut scenes: a smashed glass bottle; a figure pinned to a gnarled tree with arrows; a dismembered hand. Human cruelty is matched by that of nature, shown in a pack of dogs dismembering a hare, or a snake in the grass. An abandoned caravan adds a touch of modernity to an otherwise very gothic sensibility. The book closes with innocent lovers’ runes carved on a tree stump. Yet even this scene has violence in it – the tree is dead, and love is defined in an act of incision.
Hans Christian Andersen had a passion for scherenschnitte, or paper cutting, a childish craft which concealed a sinister unease. In the paper cut, what is hidden by the medium’s awkwardness and simple outline – facial features, figures behind a door – echo our earliest nightmares. As with mobiles, Miles has taken something seemingly innocent and invested it with horror. It is no coincidence that this book’s structure reminds me of the rotating pop-up storybooks – Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood – which were tied above my bed as a child. This is a work which relies on fairytale notions of the wild, rather than the modern ecological concept of nature as a sustaining force. Miles has created a locus amoenus, a ‘pleasant place’ in the tradition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: a beautiful setting for gruesome acts.
A more conventional illustrator might have hewed these images from black-line woodcuts or linocuts. Miles’ use of paper cuts, photographed, adds an extra dimension to the narrative. The violence of cutting emphasises the violence of the disjointed and dysfunctional narratives. Shifts in focus subtly work on the viewer’s nerves. Blurred shapes loom in the foreground or at page edges, just recognisable as images from earlier in the narrative, implying that all the action is happening at once. With such games Miles escapes from the linear constraints of the codex binding structure. This is a busy yet deserted forest; as in the convoluted plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the reader has to suspend disbelief in order to refrain from asking how characters do not bump into one another – the monsters escaping from gothic towers, the hooded dancing wraiths, the men urinating against trees, apparently oblivious to the helpless legs of corpses dangling from branches above them.
In the best schlock horror tradition, the power of scenes rests partly in the naïve qualities of the process: photographs which show the slip of the knife in its exacting task of cutting minute angles underscore the premeditated malice. But while the silhouettes evoke a fantasy Tim Burton forest, the book materials could not be more industrial. Machine-made paper and a crude stapled binding suggest a clinical environment which is belied by the imagery. Perhaps this is an instance when a sewn or adhesive binding and a smaller edition size might have been advisable in order to preserve the atmosphere of the artist’s original. In a recent work, Spirits of the Wood, the American book artist Roni Gross invoked a forest not only with photography but also papers which suggested bark fibres and leaf forms. I would like to see more work from David Miles in book form, but I suspect it will have even more impact if he begins to use paper as an active media, as well as the passive victim of his knife.
Nancy Campbell is a writer and bookseller. She studied letterpress printing and bookbinding at Barbarian Press in Canada, and has worked for several years printing, binding and casting type in Britain and America.
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Nancy Campbell
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