The Brooklyn Rail

London-based artist Anousha Payne has rendered mythology and oral tradition tangible, animistic, and immediate through paintings and sculptures that give contemporary and often sartorial form to explorations of her heritage. Last year, drawing inspiration from Indian folklore, the Iron Age Celtic sculpture the Corleck Head, and the writing of Clarice Lispector, the artist interpreted tales of metamorphosis through slouched ceramic vests, tied with silk ribbon as if clinging to their absent wearers,¹ and seeping watercolor self-portraits that gaze in three directions.² For Tender Mooring, her current solo exhibition at Deli Gallery in New York, eight new works (all 2023) respond to “The Gravity of Fur,” a fictional story written by Payne. The resulting exhibition follows a transformation of its maker as she grapples with the narrative’s central relationship.

In Payne’s plot, a woman falls in love with a soft, reptilian, glistening creature who visits her daily for hours-long moments of wordless camaraderie in the garden before retreating to the mud with its fellow slugs. The creature’s eyes face downwards, rooted to the earth. So, too, do the eyes of the figure in Payne’s Shadow study, their neck protruding from the right side of a square canvas, their head centered in the composition, disjointed, slick with bio resin, and haloed by a jagged white shadow that drips with geometric gravity.

The press release for the exhibition refers to this colorless curved space, a recurring motif in the new paintings, as a symbol of “the creature’s presence,” a “conceptual blind spot,” and a space “for reflections of the self to be cast.” While these voids might signal a spiritual opportunity, their peripheries claw in two directions. From the foreground and background of the paintings, finger-like forms reach into the distance between the glowing figures and the blurred constellations that surround them—and the constellations reach back. The resulting compositions shift while remaining static, simultaneously suggesting an anchoring and an upheaval. These unresolved configurations, working in tandem with the glossy overcoats of bio resin across Payne’s painted figures, visualize Payne’s curiosity and desire to probe beneath the surface of things, mirroring the artist as she writes errant life and language into the isolating stillness of her landscape.

A push-and-pull suspension continues across the other works in the exhibition, including two of its wall sculptures. In Becoming home, sets of feet, faces, and arms shaped from walnut and rattan look towards one another, afloat and locked in embrace. Eight delicate, iridescent ceramic slugs latch to the wall and to curves of the limbs. In in tender sanctity; the home, at the rear of the exhibition, the slugs have multiplied into the hundreds, spiraling between the remaining pairs of woven visages and open hands, with feet forgotten and the ground deserted. These works are quieter, more fragmented and sparse than Payne’s past sculptures; they are understood more through their choreography and interrelation of parts than through the textures or formal qualities of their materials. Read in sequence, they speak to the abundant but elusive rewards of collaboration. They also look outward—to each other and to viewers circulating through the exhibition space. Despite their large scale, they draw viewers towards them, relying on observant eyes to bring their components together into resolution.

Payne has wondered if the prospect of a woman in love with an imaginary creature is existential or dissociative.³ Neither answer seems to give sufficient credit to the artist’s dear mollusc, who, reaching through fiction, facilitates Payne’s turn in focus toward her present self and place. In her sculpture Tenderly moored, a snail’s shell protrudes from a ceramic face’s forehead and a slug slithers across its cheek, both as ingrained as scars. A salvage knit billows beneath, unraveling to wispy traces as it falls towards the floor. Tender Mooring signals the creation and absorption of a second sight, and the quiet havoc that wreaks on the threads of a carefully considered humanity. Payne has imbibed the invertebrate composed from her solitude, and emerged to tell the tale.

1. See Tangled toes, twisted ears, which was on view at Public Gallery, London from May 11 to June 11, 2022.
2. See thick mud slowly oozing, Payne’s first solo exhibition in the US, which was on view at Stellarhighway, New York from September 18 to November 20, 2022.
3. From an interview with Anousha Payne and Laila Tara H., Friendsoffriends.com, 2022.