Exhibition and Analysis: Echoes by Marguerite Humeau
'Echoes' is an installation by Marguerite Humeau that I saw during the trip to London at Tate Britian and though, I initially dismissed it, I found it an inspiration in the decision to paint my installation white. The room of the installation is completely yellow, baring some of the floor and this is the main reason it came to mind. When I walked into the exhibition I immediately felt overwhelmed as everything was covered in yellow, it completely confuses the sense and leaves you disorientated and shaken. Which is exactly the point. Though, where Humeau uses the yellow as a symbol, I want my piece to appear as a blank canvas and then, once the lights switch over, to be full of UV drawings and writings.
Humeau's installation is meant to transform the gallery room into a temple-laboratory hybrid that marries ancient Egyptian mythology with the modern day advancement of science. When you walk in, there are two plastic looking containers - one in snake kind of formation and the other looks like a uterus - and a row of barrels all connected with tubes of liquid. All the time there's an audio of a woman speaking in some kind of demonic sounding voice in languages that are unknown to the average viewer. With no prior knowledge the piece is completely ludicrous and it doesn't make sense so it really shows how ideas aren't necessarily communicated and that context is vital for many works.
This piece is supposed to be 'a confrontation of life and death' that uses two sculptures to represent Egyptian Goddesses, Wadjet and Taweret. Wadjet is one of the oldest Egyptian Goddesses and represents Protection, particularly of the ruling leader and women in labour. She is usually depicted as a cobra and though that carries connotations of death and links in the voice, she is firmly viewed as a protective Goddess. On the other hand, Taweret is the Egyptian Goddess of Fertility and was thought to help women in labour and to ward off evil from mother and baby. These containers represent each Goddess, the snake shaped one for Wadjet and the one that looks like a uterus for Taweret, reducing the both of them to easy to interpret symbols. Though with no knowledge before had the viewer is left wondering why exactly they are shaped that way. The containers look clinical and scientific, despite their shaping, and it creates a sense of the two Goddesses mixing up an 'elixir of life' of sorts, as both protect and bring new life into the world. Though this seems quite a modern concept with both medical and scientific advancements, Humeau shows the pursuit for immortality is an 'echo' back to the ancient world. The Ancient Egyptians are particularly well known for the preservation of bodies as mummified forms, due to the belief the body needed to be saved for the Afterlife, where the souls of the deceased would remain for the rest of time.
The next question I had when looking back on this piece, was what Humeau thinks could become the key to immortal life and thankfully this was written up from research Humeau did herself. Taweret was often depicted with a hippopotamus head and a crocodile tail, Humeau found there are natural antibiotics in Hippopotamus milk and that alligator blood is resistant to a number of viruses including HIV. And it's these that run through the tubes of the piece and collates in the barrels. Looking back, had I know what the liquids were I probably would have screamed and it's this element of gore that makes me unsure if Humeau is a genius or if she's just a little mad. Perhaps, a little bit of both.
The piece is then taken further as she questions what life really is, as if there wasn't enough going on in this piece already, Humeau pushes this with the recreated voice of Cleopatra. She speaks in several different languages, thought to be the nine she knew in her lifetime and though her voice has been resurrected, there's no way to bring Cleopatra, body and mind back. She's reduced to singing love songs on loop for now and that really highlights how permanent and irreversible death is and how much is lost to the past. This almost makes the viewers agree with immortality despite all the problems it could and would potentially bring. This is furthered with the overwhelmingly bright and oppressive yellow. The paint is made from the venom of black mambas, a kind of snake usually found in Florida. This links back to Cleopatra, who committed suicide with asp poison - asps now recognised as Egyptian cobras, which brings it back to Wadjet. There's a kind of irony in that, that permeates the piece and creates these links which then create cycles as everything links back to the three women and each aspect explored previously, linking back to the name of the exhibition 'Echoes'. These links and echoes, mimic the cycles of life, death and the inevitability of each whilst also showing the lack of originality in our ambitions and crises, they merely 'echo' those of the past.
This piece is very esoteric and now I know what I'm supposed to, it makes perfect sense and is unbelievably conceptual and deep and I can't properly fathom it, but that's what I love about it. There's so much thought behind it, but it only becomes apparent when you take the time to research and understand and question.