catastrophe soup

Peacock & the worm is delighted to present Catastrophe Soup, a publication and an exhibition by Aberdeen-based artist Caitlyn Holly Main, curated by Enxhi Mandija.

Scenarios of disaster are consumed within the space of a verse, a line, as words collide and morph, words tacky with material qualities – they are sensitive to the touch, they have taste, they smell of wintergreen oil. Catastrophe Soup is a collection of thirty short texts, written along thirty days, crystalising in a short span of time an expansive net of concerns and images relating to food, intimacy, romance and desire. The texts are framed by fragments of sketches and drawings entwined in the same fabric as the words. The accompanying exhibition of mixed-media prints, writing and drawing, similarly stages small scenes of vulnerability and resistance, tenderness and voluptuousness, moments of touch. Main’s practice produces work that is fragile, nervous, spindly yet taut, tender yet highly strung, documenting moments of failing touch, desire, and ghostly consumption.

Approaching writing as one of the elements of a visual arts practice, Main’s use of language in Catastrophe Soup resembles her sculptural works: language is a rich material to be engaged with, at times malleable and pliable, at others gritty and uncomfortable. Her prose-poetry is shimmering, iridescent, changing hue slightly according to the angle it is seen from. The shapes that language takes, in their strangeness, unfamiliarity, or lush excitement, rehearse the rituals, performances, and expressions of desire that surround food and romantic and erotic love. The collection takes the form of a Risograph-printed book with a screenprinted cover in a limited edition of 100.

The exhibition in the worm, housing a series of prints accompanied by writing and drawing, continues and amplifies Main’s investigation of writing as mark-making and the possibilities for voice, duration, and temporality to emerge from ‘visual’ practices. Both writing and printmaking explore drawing as a practice made, in the artist’s words, of ‘marks representing traces of touch, drawing alluding to moments of connection and forms of non-representational documentation.’ The prints are aware of the texts that surround them in the same way that the texts are built with an awareness of the space around them, not just how they sit on the page but also the context of drawing, painting, sketching and printing that they are borne out of. There is an awareness that writing extends beyond what marks on a page can signify. In Catastrophe Soup, these marks are but the trace of a presence that often can’t be entirely quantified or seized or even grasped – teeth marks in butter, a recurring image, a refrain.

Operating between writing, printmaking and performance, the different mediums act like many mouths speaking the same words, spitting them out pulped. In writing as in drawing, layers are traced then erased, paying attention to the residues left and what they have to say. Recurring words and signs build a highly personal, tentative yet solid vocabulary of marks that are traces of something else – images, residues, foodstuffs, each of them concentrating within it a larger sphere of meanings and implications (funnel-words; periscope-words; snow-globe words).

Food, intimacy and romance are tied together as rituals of consumption: the characters in the collection want to simultaneously resist and yield to their desire, simultaneously hold their own and let themselves be consumed or consume. Consumption itself is explored as a transformative moment where states change, where distinctions between inner/outer, me/you lapse in a tangled mass of new substances. Can you be close to someone without giving up something of yourself, while keeping yourself whole? Can you touch without being touched? Changed, transformed?

Paradigms of consumption characterise food and romantic love in Catastrophe Soup. The desire for something or someone seems to bring with it a paradox of yielding and resistance, proximity through transformation or annihilation. Food is fetishized, ritualised, associated to spectacle and performativity in a similar way to romantic relations: tangled in a complex dialogue of cross-references and associations, they are affected and transformed by each other’s proximity.

Texts and prints are shaped by a pursue of delicacy, both as delectable, rare foodstuffs, and as moments of tender, lyrical encounter, met with a grotesque undercurrent. Words and images stay suspended between real and unreal, death and life – an oyster shell mutating into a halved apple, a womb, a pomegranate, a pair of lungs; lines (drawn, of verse) tendrils and tentacles jutting out into space, sticking around. Catastrophe Soup plays out a gentle poetics of encounters that attend to what sticks, stains, smears, transfers, a glossary of tactile residues that speak of love, care, excitement, tenderness and fear.

– Enxhi Mandija, November 2022