“Invisible ink is a good starting point”

A commissioned essay

Hi,

I was commissioned by artist Natasha Rees to write about her most recent exhibition, ‘Time travel as fantasy capsule for freedom from heavy weights’, which ran at Ridley Road Project Space, SET Woolwich.

It’s always a particular kind of process, writing about an artist in this way – not the more distanced relationship that comes with review writing, where I’m working with an editor and imagining an audience, trying not to be overly influenced by the artist’s own framing. This feels more like going ‘inside’ to a certain extent. In many ways, I prefer it: it’s closer to how I understood myself as a writer when I first began. A partisan of sorts – writing in support of and in dialogue with the artist, rather than pegged to a publication, and all the pressures and rituals that entails.

Natasha is also a writer in her own right, so in the lead-up to encountering the exhibition in full, I had material to read, and our conversations were invaluable, too. Through this, I had a sense of some of the ideas and reference points she was thinking through – opacity, encoded language, containment and leakage, speculative fiction, the aesthetics of negation.

Writing after the fact, in the wake of experiencing the show in its final form, I realise this essay attempts a similar kind of decoding that the works themselves are engaged in – tracing patterns, echoes and tensions as they emerge across material, title, form and mood.

Full text below. I hope you enjoy.

Chris

PS. Her CLASSWAROOM is a brilliant and under-recognised project. Check it out.

Installation detail: (from left) "Antechamber to the gunk zone////" 2025, black matt vinyl, gloss and matt decals, "Refuse and corpses signify life" 2025, charred wood, resin seal, architectural wire, steel fixtures.

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A Whisper in the Dark: Natasha Rees

The introductory text for artist Natasha Rees’s exhibition ‘Time travel as fantasy capsule for freedom from heavy weights’, which ran from 13 February – 28 March at RRPS, SET Woolwich, riffs on an ancient invisible ink and more contemporary uses of ultraviolet light used to decode it. Invisible ink is a good starting point – not simply as a metaphor for what is seen and unseen, or perceptible just beneath the surface, but a visual catalyst of encoded messages, the desire, or need, to share them through oblique means.

Mostly sculptures and drawings, with installation elements such as black-out vinyl that eclipses any natural light or views of the surrounding area, the artworks are dense and evocative. Refuse and corpses signify life, 2025, is a series of long charred pieces of wood, sourced from previous exhibitions, studio furniture and shelving, that are ominously nestled in the corner and inter-connected with architectural wire. The windows of the space are blacked out with matt black vinyl, also an artwork and not just scene setting, titled Antechamber to the gunk zone (////), 2025, facilitating a contemplative atmosphere. The black vinyl on the windows feature gloss oval shape decal overlays containing a matt circle inside it, some kind of symbol or graphical representation – an eye? a spotlight? a pill?

Echoing through the show are repeated motifs and a wide-ranging subject matter that elaborate a veiled language. Allusive forms repeat throughout: four corresponding oval shapes appear on the spray-painted black floor, If you concentrate hard, you’ll see it, 2025, bear similarities to a series of drawings with black holes – including drains, pupils, and open mouths. The drawings are tenderly rendered in graphite and colour pencil: ( o Busted lips), 2025, shows a distinctly Beckettian open mouth and lips against a stark graphite background – bruised, yes, but perhaps singing. ( o Snake mouth) lunges towards us as if trying to escape from the frame. The others – ( o Asbestos drain), ( o Dilated pupil), ( o Broken glass) and ( o Sewage pipe) – are true to the subjects of their titles, and yet not without a sense of mystery, mostly showing the black void inside and around them. The images could be read in sequence like the storyboard for a film, perhaps a horror, and share themes that foreshadow violence and danger – the animal attacking, the damaged body, the broken objects.

Rees often uses a stark black palette – she talks about it as an aesthetic of negation, but also possibility – and this atmosphere creates a hint of danger, if not a subtle gesture towards fetish culture, or the extreme cinema of the ‘New French Extremity’. The point, perhaps, is how richly symbolic yet opaque the cultural connotations of black are; an operative metaphor for her practice. The ever-present hints at interpretation invite the viewer to translate what is happening. The exhibition is layered with meaning, as suggested by the richly evocative titles that read like poetry: previously mentioned works, such as Antechamber to the gunk zone (////), make reference to the speculative notion in Mereology, the philosophical study of part and whole relationships, to ‘gunk theory’ – which Rees refers to as, “…the zone as a space for infinite possibilities for resolve, but also of disaster…”.

A sense of disaster looms – but not fatalism. The title of the exhibition evokes not just the idea of escapism, but a desire for revolt and resistance. With the exhibition as a space loaded with a rich referential lexicon, the stripped back aesthetic hums with the narrative approach from figures that Rees cites as influences – filmmakers Michael Haneke and Gasper Noé, choreographer Michael Clark and musician Mark E. Smith – who each strip their work to its vital elements, inviting the audience to unpack and make sense of the complete narrative fragments on offer.

Like a whisper in the dark, Rees’s work doesn’t hand over its meanings easily, yet it neither withholds them. Her practice operates through suggestion, structure and affect – privileging rigour, collectivity, and the slow work of making things visible. Read and look carefully, and something begins to emerge: not a single message, but a kind of code, shaped by context, held in tension, and animated by the belief that meaning can be nurtured and teased out, like the solidarity found through quiet persistence.