The sound of a heart beating breathes out across a room that seems filled with memorials in David Eustace’s exhibition of sculptures, prints and funereal photographs that wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of a Joy Division record. The sound also recalls Breath(1969), Samuel Beckett’s miniature piece of proto sound art that charted matters of life and death. Here, the steady rhythms of Eustace’s heart casts a kind of raging calm across the exhibition, its occasional missed beats leaving a fleeting silence in which to contemplate the void.
A tombstone engraved with the exhibition’s title sits at its start, in front of a platform filled with what initially look like screwed up paper cranes. On closer inspection, these are revealed as photocopies of a letter offering Eustace for adoption the day after his birth in 1961. Eustace made 1,961copies of the letter to be taken away and given new life, just as he was.
Much of what follows is about mortality, even as Eustace writes about how he doesn’t believe in death.
Many of the sculptural works, like the encased leaves collected near the grave of Gertrude Stein in Lunch with Gertrude (2018-21) are like fossils, preserved in glass casings lest they be exposed to some poison and whither. Many are accompanied by texts by Eustace, explaining his thinking.
A photographic portrait of Eustace’s friend, artist Douglas Gordon (2018), beside a tomb is accompanied by a letter from Gordon to Eustace recounting a dream concerning pilgrimages to dead poets and rock stars in Parisian graveyards. Memento Mori (2020-2022) is a series of small phone camera images of dead or decaying flowers contained in ornate frames. Mon Ami (2018) groups together twenty-nine black and white pictures of graveyard statues.
THEREAFTER is dedicated to the memory of Hugo Burge, the arts philanthropist who transformed Marchmont House in the Scottish Borders into a centre for arts and crafts, but who sadly died in 2023 aged 51. If this brings home the humanity of Eustace’s meditations on mortality, they look to the life to come as much as that lost.
This is summed up in Eustace’s written reminiscence that sits alongside a series of small photographs of Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold’s Berlin based Holocaust Memorial, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe(2004). Beyond the stillness of his images, Eustace writes how he observed two children with their families, quiet and respectful, but taken by surprise and brought alive by an unexpected snowfall. Both Eustace’s description of the children being in the moment and his own poetic response point beyond the tragedy of the holocaust to a joy of life.
Close by, another stone sits on a lectern at the centre of the room with just one word engraved on it, simply reading HOPE (2023). In a deeply personal exhibition, with Eustace very much alive and kicking, the word becomes its beating heart.
Signet Gallery, Edinburgh until 13th August
Scottish Art News, August 2023
ends
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