October 2021
BACK GALLERY

IZABELLA SHAW (SA)

What elsewhere is expressed in elegy explores the strange way in which great anguish can bring about humour. Izabella Shaw draws on a history of personal failures and an existentialist sense of absurdity to present a work that undoes its own purpose in a hopeless effort to be just right.

When reflecting on your own shortcomings or trying to understand why we’re all here, it seems that anguish is often followed by a sense of hilarity. And as illustrated by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, hilarity can in turn be followed by anguish, “a man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive.”

In the midst of this tragicomedy the world appears to lose its form, and something as mundane or quotidian as a broom can be a great source of humour. ‘What elsewhere is expressed in elegy’ is an ode to this. Through the work, Izabella Shaw seeks to give form to her own pattern of failure, while representing the uncanny formlessness the world exhibits when one is in the throes of the absurd. She does so by playing with proportion, creating a broom stretched to the width of FELTspace’s back gallery. The result is a ridiculous, surreal and pitiable object, whose efforts to be just right only render it useless.