The Egg & Dart emerges with a new collection of work from Lee Bethel, At This Point In Time. There is a grandness to the scale in these pieces but the engagement between body and surface remains time-based and intimate. There are few gestural or performative movements. We have a slippery sense of materiality here. Rag paper and wax is worked hard to evoke concrete formwork, circles punctuating the paper irregularly. In other pieces, the paper feels like stacked and undulating strips of calico. There are surfaces suggestive of layers of shale that might cut the skin, but these too are paper with pigmented wax applied.
Bethel has a motto: “Draw it first to know it,” and many of these works are established via the grid which then dissembles through process and layering. Some grids disappear and then one work re-establishes it in a punkish gesture with thick white brushmarks crossing a jagged ash grey. (It is a revisiting – a new magnification of the crossed line pattern from her father’s handkerchief.) The edges of the works are resilient but feel delicate and workable. Take a note of the engagement between work and edge and frame and wall. Some surfaces float, others suggest monolithic forms, housing, containment, a floor or a wall thoroughly worked over.
In lockdown, Lee Bethel returned to reading The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard’s inquiry on the home as phenomenological site. Bachelard proposed the house as “a nest for dreaming, a shelter for imagining”1. I saw in Lee Bethel’s home studio a more condensed version of that: a space for the collection of fragments, projects and contemplative sensibilities. The natural light in her studio also seems to emanate from these paintings. A cream white encaustic grid piece glows from within like the skylights that illuminate her studio.
There is sculpture too. A construction of encaustic on paper with bamboo supports is the most direct nod to Bachelard’s poetics of the home. The folly is a design intended to look like a romantic ruin, but Bethel brings us the Folly as an ambiguous dreamscape structure.
All the works are named. (Lee would feel cheated if a work didn’t offer a name.) The titles provide a little attachment to language that we might use to enter these surfaces. Then we go under and find a slippery materiality where rag paper and wax suggest something much heavier. What is also exciting now is the sustained investigation of luminous grids at a larger scale. The new scale is evocative of construction and transformation. As Bachelard might wonder, “How, in these fragments of space, did the human being achieve silence … the various retreats of solitary daydreaming?”2
-Melody Willis
1, 2 Bachelard, Gaston 1964 Poetics of Space, The Orion Press, Inc. p6, p9.
