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HARANGLE



Verity Coward teases modes of displaying, plays with form and engages with material agency. She takes cues from mechanics, cartoons, tableaus, theatre… with mischievous influences from Punch and Judy to Looney Tunes to Goethe’s slapstick tragedy Faust. 

Across this broad spectrum of references is a commonality: absurdity, animation, action and rule breaking. There’s a certain irreverence to seriousness which is applied to her own work. But, in order to bend the rules of our world, new rules must be made to take their place. In order to sneak around censorship laws and play out the devil during early productions of Faust, puppets were used as a remove from the real. Wile. E Coyote and Road Runner’s world has no limitations, so new ones must be made up by its animators. Coward is interested in these kinds of hijinks and elaborate ruses that occur in the uncanny. From antiquity to today, there’s a craftiness and cunning in finding ways to rearrange and find distance from reality to make a move. How might we get what we want? To which rules must we bow? Coward feels their own work can be seen as a Trojan horse or soapbox car. There’s a stunt being worked towards. A plan is hatched, much apparatus is gathered and all to fall away once the thing gets going. We must grip on to the seats, doors, roof; Harangle feels like it’s on the move.

In some reorganised version of landscape painting and still life, these final paintings originated from cardboard and papier mâché models. Unseen in the final exhibition, they hold a provisional and speculative role in Harangle. Using cardboard puts forward a limitation; Coward must work quickly and adapt to the give and will of the material. As such, the cardboard leaves its own impression on the models. Although she creates multiple stagings, sets and drawings, Coward is not repeating the process for the sake of studies. Each stage of the process is an opportunity to step away and take it to another place. It is set in motion but not plotted. 

Coward desires a separation from her subjects and is disinterested in exact mimicry. However, the work doesn’t fall into absolute abstraction; there is always a tether to the staged ‘real’. Harangle’s vocabulary is largely made up of stock images and emblems from our world – wads of cash, googly eyes, newspapers, a rocket - which are reconfigured in placeless imagined spaces. These emblems are still legible and bring with them a net of meaning understood differently by each viewer. 

Our eyes aren’t trained upon mimicry or realism but given space to travel across the canvas, pushed and pulled in suggestively.

In the act of painting, Coward is practical and purposeful; everything is at work and rough-hewn. Cardboard is used to wick the oil away and the paste-like paint that remains is pushed and carved onto canvas. 

Coward speaks of their reluctance to adapt certain parts of the paintings once they have “settled into themselves”, referencing the emergence of block shapes, frenetic underpainting or corners of landscape. She is in constant dialogue with the work, allowing it to speak for itself and hold its own in the process of making. 

Coward believes that life force is created and sustained via motion, and - to an extent - brevity. She holds rawness in high esteem; to polish away and reproduce a perfect copy is to kill off this vitality. Like delivering a well told joke or anecdote, timing and economy is everything.

Considering this idea of animation as liveliness, bestowing of life, brings in the title of the works, Harangle, of Coward’s own coinage. It compounds the meanings of “harang” and “wrangle” together, and reinforces the idea that these works are active.  The materials themselves are unpredictable and Coward’s reverence to them requires a kind of strong-handed lassoing to keep some order. Coward is both nagging and nagged  and talks of having to get hold of each of the paintings differently to “harangle” them into the “final” forms. 

In the studio, Coward enjoys actively shifting the paintings around, rehousing them to different corners like a scene change. They take on the feeling of painted backdrops of film sets or stage. The cast of models now exist somewhere within the paintings. In some, their material origins are clearly visible, whereas in others they have submerged into something else entirely.  The paintings lean towards the cartoonish, but unlike a cartoon they aren’t weightless or unmoored. They are hitched to reality by the way in which they were rooted in the material world. This contrasts with the metallic loftiness of the foil balloons. Animated with helium, they are another dance with unpredictability. They can deflate, escape, pop and move of their own accord. They now stand in as stunt doubles for the fleshy models, another removal from the real. 

Text by Dolores Carbonari
                                             
Flatland Projects
Unit 22, Beeching Road
Bexhill-on-Sea, TN39 3LJ

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