David Marron - 'Of Life and Death No More' at GV Art

David Marron - 'Of Life and Death No More' at GV Art

12 October, 2009
by: Tom Jeffreys

What is death? In some senses, that is the key question that runs through the work of contemporary artist David Marron, whose first solo exhibition is currently on show at GV Art in Marylebone. Or perhaps, what does death mean? By its very nature, death is something we can never really know. And because of that very unknowability, death has been one of mankind's overriding preoccupations ever since we learnt the capacity to communicate.

Of Life and Death No More is spread across both floors of GV Art and consists of two series of work over the last 4 years. The Upper Gallery plays host to a three-part installation entitled Imaginary Shipwreck whilst downstairs contains ongoing project Circular Ruin, scheduled to be fully completed at some point in 2010.

The ground floor gallery is dominated by a mixed media sculpture of a female figure sitting in a wheelchair inside a metal cage. On the left-hand wall by the entrance is a large drawing with collaged elements whilst series of smaller works are hung round the other walls. These works represent Marron's response to a Rembrandt's famous portrait of Margaretha de Geer. The painting and references to it recur throughout the series alongside all manner of peculiar allusions: Salome, medieval scientific diagrams, a protractor, atomic models, boiled sweets, roulette baize, snakes, butterflies and Egyptian Queen Nefertiti.


David Marron, 'Imaginary Shipwreck' (2005-7)
installation shot © Peter Kidd

Downstairs sees the exhibition take a significantly darker tone. Throughout the various gallery rooms are twelve horrific corpse-like figures in varying shades of ochre. Each one of these life-size zombie-type creatures represents a different character, so there's The Mother – a multi-armed monstrosity carrying a baby in one hand – and The Arbiter – a wailing figure hunched in a cage. These are direct, raw and uncompromising works, shocking and powerful, and yet – to my surprise – humour emerges. It takes a bit of time, but these works are actually quite hilarious.

There's a fine line between pathos and humour and Marron skips along it with evident glee. My favourite figure – and the artist's too, he says – is The Senile. A baffled looking figure, sporting a blue hospital coat points vacantly into the middle distance. The expression is as if he has just remembered something frightfully important, but in attempting to articulate this fact, has completely forgotten whatever it actually was. In his breast pocket sits a packet of forget-me-not seeds and out of his tartan granny shopper pokes the head of some weird mutant lizard. It's made of varnished parma ham.


David Marron, 'Circular Ruin' (2007-ongoing)
installation shot © Peter Kidd

Likewise there's something amusing in the figure of The Doctor. Given that Marron himself is a professional paramedic, it's hardly surprising that this is packed full of fascinating references to the history of medicine and medical philosophy. Glass eyes and a long beak recall the Great Plague, whilst the figure's torso is a medicine cabinet stacked with all manner of cures: leaches and laudanum, fennel seeds and paracetamol. Next to him is The Illuminant, who stands among candles bearing the names of various prominent Enlightenment thinkers – Locke, Diderot, Voltaire.

Talking to the artist it becomes clear that these are not chance references. Every little element – from comedy moustaches to mussel shells – is carefully considered for the appropriateness of the symbolism, a symbolism that is at once synchronic and intensely personal. History, language, art – in Marron's imaginative world, all is a collage of symbols.

But what exactly do we mean by symbols here? What does it mean to be symbolic? The word itself derives from the Greek verb συμβάλλω, which means I compare, correspond, throw together, come to a conclusion. συμβάλλω is formed from the preposition συv (with, together) and the stem βάλλω (I put, throw) and so in some ways it's one of those words that aptly describes itself.


David Marron, 'Circular Ruin' (2007-ongoing)
installation shot © Peter Kidd

Marron's work may therefore be seen as a visual playing out of these notions of the symbol. Throwing together all manner of different materials, objects, historical periods and belief-systems, Marron is carrying out an exploration of the very nature of the symbol.

It's important to point out that Circular Ruin is an unfinished project. In a small side room, various charts and plans map out the way in which the finished installation will be presented. Everything has its place, its meaning – nothing is left to chance. I worry that the very specificity of the meanings here might in some ways limit what is otherwise an endlessly open-ended viewing experience. But Marron reassures me: 'people are encouraged to interpret each piece however they want,' he says. Given that the whole project consists of a very personal response to a number of sources of inspiration it's a relief to hear the artist never attempting to control the variety of personal responses to his own work.

And that is what we mean by a symbol. A symbol is an open-ended pointer, one that guides towards a meaning, but never to the exclusion of others. If a symbol only symbolised one thing it would be redundant. It's a throwing together of ideas, a collage – like Locke's Association of Ideas or Saussure's chains of signifiers. Symbols create ambiguity – indeed they thrive upon it – but perversely it is symbols that allow us to make sense of that ambiguity, that uncertainty. And this is why death is so closely associated with the symbolic. Nothing is more uncertain than death; death is the ultimate certainty.

Of Life and Death - No More is at GV Art until 21st November 2009.

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Tom Jeffreys