Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London
Watt’s bleak nothingness casts spectral shadows – it is positively strange to look this hard at things nowadays
Sir John Soane was a melancholy soul. Not content with a skull as a memento mori, he acquired the stone sarcophagus of pharaoh Seti I, which gapes like the mouth to the Underworld in the shadow-filled basement of his museum at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Two hundred years on, at his country house at Ealing, his fellow spirit, the painter Alison Watt, stares at the world with the kind of bleak thoughts he savoured.
Watt’s exhibition starts with a painting of a broken plaster cast of a classical child’s head. Like all her still lifes, it is done with precision and craft. It is also totally eerie. The white plaster child’s eyes are blank, devoid of pupils. There is a blue-shadowed hole, where the hollow head has been broken off from its body, opening a lane to the land of the dead. Uneasy? Good, then the ghost story can begin.
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