If being around fragile objects gives you the sweats and fills you with the fear that you’re seconds away from tripping over and accidentally destroying someone’s life’s work, this exhibition may not be for you. The first room of Susan Collis’s show of new work, ‘All this falling’, is made up of impossibly fragile art. What look like frayed pieces of tarpaulin on the floor and wall are actual single sheets of perfectly detailed and barely-held-together bits of paper. They’re so dangerously slight, so clearly the results of hours of meticulous work, that they make me shakily nervous.
It’s a neat continuation of Collis’s aesthetic. She’s made paint splatters out of mother of pearl, screws out of gold and diamonds, but these works seem more focused on fragility and dedication than previous pieces.
The other works here are huge sheets of charcoal-black paper, the result of wall rubbings from derelict homes. These big drawings shimmer with the lives that once lived in these spaces, they feel heavy with the destruction of a place. In dereliction, as in tarpaulin, Collis finds something to unpick.
What Collis does is uncover the sublime in the mundane. She finds beauty in stains and screws, strength in the fragility of a tarp, a subtle power in the aesthetics that surround us. Maybe there’s beauty everywhere, Collis just seems to know how to point it out.
