Chara Lewis, Kristin Mojsiewicz and Anneké Pettican have been creating together as Brass Art for twenty-five years, and rock, quiver and bend, which opened this week at HOME in Manchester, brings together some of their enduring obsessions and inspirations. Here is sculpture, installation, performance and documentation across photography and film. An ongoing interest in deep and geological time is countered by the most fleeting moments of disposability, especially through the artists’ fascination with cellophane. Everything is made from light and shadow to play with perception, allusion and illusion, time and the unconscious. Some of their touchstones are puppetry, Jungian shadow work and historic women artists including Florine Stettheimer and the Brontë sisters, but the key figure here is Virginia Woolf. The exhibition references her work explicitly and indirectly, including The Waves, To the Lighthouse, and Mrs Dalloway. Indeed the show’s title, rock, quiver and bend, is borrowed from one of Clarissa Dalloway’s internal monologues and in this quoting subjected to the delightful sort of slippy detournement that Brass Art seem to thrive on: the ‘delightful rock’ that was Mrs Dalloway’s home becomes now a direct instruction to the viewer, to move back and forth, repeatingly – to refract oneself like a beam of light through the matter gathered in this space. But, for me, the text that reverberates through this show is the short story, The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection, which foregrounds perception’s fallibility. Woolf could be describing this exhibition when she writes: ‘The room that afternoon was full of such shy creatures, lights and shadows, curtains blowing, petals falling – things that never happen, so it seems, if someone is looking.’
For a while now I’ve found myself repeatedly brushing up against that moment before language grabs hold of the world. Does it actually exist? Am I reaching for an unearned sense of wonder or enchantment here, or does the very fact that those states are explicable preclude their inclusion in that moment I’m trying to talk to you about? In a recent conversation with a colleague, it became dubbed ‘the crisp packet moment’. Imagine you don’t have your glasses on when some solid shape blows across your vision, twisting and reflecting light back at you. There’s a split second when this object is nameless, before language starts to coagulate – colourful, printed, shiny, lightweight – then suddenly the matter becomes in your mind the crisp packet that it is.
I suppose the crisp packet moment has something in common with the Deleuzian body without organs, or Bataille going on and on about orgasms, or the glamourised tales about heroin told in the nineties. But it’s so much more commonplace than all that. Whatever it is, that’s the moment that Brass Art seem to be trying to capture and augment.

The major new work here is ‘this voice; this life; this procession’(2024), a thirteen-minute two channel video work composed using LiDAR and Kinect scanning technologies. LiDAR – Light Detection and Ranging – uses lasers to create 3D models of the real world and is often used by architects. It is one of those poetic technologies of metaphor: it calculates distances based on the Time of Flight, or how long it takes light to travel between surfaces and sensors, reminiscent of the pulses of colour and light that punctuate the unrolling narrative time of Woolf’s writings. Kinect is a different scanning technology developed by Microsoft for the Xbox, that detects and translates physical movements into images on screen. Brass Art took these two technologies to Woolf’s writing shed in Rodmell, East Sussex, and between them produced a new articulation of a stream of consciousness.
The resulting piece is at once beautiful, ethereal, and politically potent, repeatedly pulling me into that crisp packet moment where I don’t know how to describe what I’m looking at. It is so rare to actually be pushed into a defamiliarising experience in an art gallery – to be taken so far into one’s senses that language falters. But with ‘this voice; this life; this procession’, it is difficult to apply names to the objects being depicted or orient yourself at all. The screen is a mass of swarming dots that now gather to resemble the ghost of a sturdy, leafless tree, but now dissolve and coagulate as something else I can’t quite name. It is just as Woolf describes the mystery items in her looking glass: ‘unrecognisable and irrational and entirely out of focus…’ My brain tries to make sense of it, grasping for signifiers and descriptions, now flying under a sea of moss, now shaking a topographical map out over a doll’s house, now ascending towards a single tombstone comprised of dots floating in darkness. The digital pointillist effect is caused by the way the LiDAR laser hits matter, and is built into the technology, but when Mojsiewicz describes the dots as ‘the surface of the data’, I’m struck again by the poetry we turn to in communicating this artwork. Lewis and Mojsiewicz both concede that they still struggle to articulate it, even after having spent so much time with these technological processes and artworks.
Away from Woolf’s shed, they used a digital camera to move into the scans in ghostly ways, so the viewfinder seemingly travels into and through solid matter. Things that look just like walls, trees, grass and ground give way – we move straight through them like air. The proximity of these appearances to real objects is, I think, what gives the film its uncanniness. It’s not like looking at an abstract painting, or a colour gradient. It’s a lesson in rubbing up against the ends of understanding through perception – we see but our computations get muddled. The limitations of the technology itself exemplifies this. The large black spots that traverse the screen are, it turns out, the places the scanner can’t compute – the locations where its physical feet were planted to hold up its adventuring viewfinder, but that can’t be penetrated by its own gaze. What can’t be captured appears as black space, an occlusion in the data. Literally a shadow; the spooky otherworld on the verso of a rationalist page. Something nonhuman.
The visual shifts in ‘this voice; this life; this procession’are perfectly augmented by Annie Mahtani’s accompanying soundscape, which makes everything that much more visceral – my breath catches and my pulse skips as we transgress material borders. This is the described audio of the looking glass afternoon: ‘a perpetual sighing and ceasing sound, the voice of the transient and the perishing.’ But it is somehow also grounding, keeping me rooted as I fall into magical space. I could continue watching for hours. The sound is mellow, blending into the background in a way that makes it feel almost naturally occurring. Partly created with the noises made by cellophane being manipulated, in this perceptually disrupted space I think of sound artist Annea Lockwood’s invocation to ‘listen with’ rather than ‘to’, and perceive an understanding of the interconnectedness of the elements in Brass Art’s practice wrapping around me.
The sound carries through the entire exhibition, right to the back room where the origins of their interest in puppetry and shadow play are on show. Les Pupazzi Noirs: Ombres Animées is an 1896 book by Louis Lemercier De Neuville containing puppet stencils, opened to a page which shows in profile a human-like form wearing puffed out black skirts, their head elongated to a point, having been turned into a carrot. Such playful metamorphosis resounds through other works in the show but can be seen most clearly in the ‘Apparition Series’ (2014-2024), a mesmerising set of images that have at once a nostalgic and otherworldly quality – the familiarity of 19th century silhouettes on a flickering Lumière brothers carousel. At first glance the work is blackly solid, with white lightbox backgrounds illuminating human figures whose edges are made hazy with layered up coloured cellophane. They seem to flicker, move and change – or in fact they do, I suddenly realise, as six spider arms fold out over one another in what turns out to be video. Some of the imagery in the film includes big, pale elliptical shapes made with mirrors during the artists’ performances to camera, creating portals that to my mind connect back to the blackly impenetrable circles of ‘this voice; this life; this procession’. Here, the shadow becomes costume for the artists to dress up in, taking on alter egos they might otherwise avoid.

Florine Stettheimer is cited as an inspiration for this series, specifically the set designs she made to accompany the 1928 opera Four Saints in Three Acts, for which Gertrude Stein wrote the libretto. An archival photograph is included in Brass Art’s ‘Constellation’, a wall of images showing instances from their research and practice. The black and white shot of the opera shows the cast gathered beneath the draped canopy of cellophane that Stettheimer constructed for a ceiling, which seems to be explicitly called upon by Brass Art’s ‘the torrent of things grown so familiar’ (2024). This installation, at the centre of the exhibition, comprises two mountainous forms of draped and pinned mylar, a thicker kind of cellophane. One form seemingly emerges, volcano-like, from the ground, and the other falls from the ceiling like an enormous icicle formation, together like stalactites and stalagmites slowly developing deep underground. Taking their footprints from the rough outline of Mount Vesuvius, these works emerge from Brass Art’s ongoing interest in geological time, previously referenced in works such as terrain erratique (2023),in which they wrapped the Ice Age andesite boulder outside the Manchester Museum in silver cellophane. Here, the artists exploit a quirk in the mylar used to construct these forms, by which what can appear solidly opaque is melted to transparency with the addition of LED lights. Within the mountains are various illuminated 3D-printed objects, including gesturing hands and teaching models of biological forms, eerily visible through the thin wall of material. This gestures back to Brass Arts’ ‘Still Life’series, in which the shadows of 3D-printed items were cast onto the walls of The Whitworth (2011) and Bury Art Museum (2018).
Just like in the ‘Apparition Series’, light and cellophane is the transformative combination here. But there’s something niggling me about the materials – the artificiality in which Brass Art chooses to reproduce natural forms and represent deep time. How can a long-term fascination with the earth ethically culminate in the production and use of nonbiological, possibly indestructible materials? (Mylar is, after all, a plastic product.) Should all artists be held to the same ethical standards in any case? Am I asking for all new artworks to biodegrade naturally? Triggering these spiralling worries, what Brass Art urge here are questions about narrative and framing. Reproductions are, in a way, repetitions, and the larger questions being asked in this space are about how we attempt to make what we see map onto what we think we know – how we value the relationship between our perception and our knowledge.
In this way, everything Brass Art makes is about light and shadow, thus about directionality and relation. Light waves and intentions hitting phenomena and understandings. rock, quiver and bend ultimately questions how knowledge, narratives and framing can both illuminate and obfuscate. At a time when global hegemonic narratives so desperately need to be overturned, the political valence of this work can’t be understated, no matter how tangential it might at first appear. We can port the moment of transformative realisation that these works induce over to our daily lives and our politics, in hope. It’s the abundant possibility that the first rational linguistic explanation that lands might not be the best one, and if we can find ways to hold open a space of unknowing, we can create room for other ideas.. And although the ideas and themes brought together in this show might seem disparate, this is also what it’s like being alive – to be continually discombobulated by conflicting data and somehow forging on, our streams of consciousness persisting, with each moment’s sensory input illuminated by the unstoppable processes of thought. What Brass Art remind us of is the capacity that the shadows have to hold on to secrets, the power that we have as humans to delve in and unleash them, and the responsibilities to weigh up in doing so.
Brass Art, rock, quiver, and bend, HOME, Manchester, Sunday 2 June – Sunday 1 September2024.
Jazmine Linklater is a poet and writer based in Manchester.
This article is supported by HOME.
Published 13.06.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
2,145 words