Visual Descriptions: Juliana Capes

Through funding from British Art Network for our collaborative project, we were delighted to be able to commission four visual descriptions of artworks chosen by members of the Emerging Curators Group We hope these detailed descriptions by artist and visual describer Juliana Capes will act as a lasting resource for sharing these artworks in a more accessible way.

Juliana Capes is an artist and researcher based in Edinburgh -over the last 15 years, she has worked extensively with a Visually Impaired audience, notably as lead artist on the National Gallery of Scotland’s Visual Impairment programme. We were first introduced to Juliana's work through her Sunset Reports which we recommend listening to here: http://www.julianacapes.co.uk/artwork/sunset-reports/

This is a digital photograph taken from a film by the Scottish artist Saoirse Amira Anis. This color film was made in 2022 and is called was called “Symphony for a fraying body”. The film itself shows a costumed tasselled creature filmed performing in coastal settings. The image has wide rectangular, landscape format, the dimensions of a screen.

The particular moment this film still captures is the creature standing on a beach looking out to sea. It is a silhouetted humanlike form with its back to us and its open arms to the ocean as a low sun sets or rises over the sand, rocks and waves. The rays of the starlike sun emerge around the side of the torso of the figure.

The figure is the most immediately striking part of the image and is positioned centrally in the composition. It has its back to us and we see most of its form from the ankles up, filling almost the entirety of the vertical central plane of the image. Its posture resembles that of a crucifix shape due its arms being outstretched.

Although we can only see its silhouette we can see long tassels of rope drip from its outstretched arms, falling vertically in line with the sides of the thick torso. Soft tendrils of frayed material blur the edges of its form. On either side of its head we can see two curved forms protrude almost like curled horns. Looking closely at the tassels and tendrils we can see they are coloured in a strong saturated red and have the texture of twisted rope.

The image is saturated by a hazy warm light contrasting with dark silhouetted shapes. We are looking out from land to sea, the creature stands between us and the shore. The horizon line where the calm sea meets the soft cloudy sky is roughly a third of the way up the image. In the bottom third behind the figure there are lines of dark silhouetted rocks coming in from the left-hand side of the image like a long knobbly finger of the land pointing into the ocean. The atmosphere is very warm and calm and could sound like a long mediative drone.

The low sun is setting or rising over the sand, rocks and waves. The creature seems to extend a wide-armed embrace towards the sun and the sea. The sun is a bright circular point reflected in the sea. The rays from the sun and its reflection spill out like the points of a star and peek around the side of the figure’s torso.

This image is an abstract brightly coloured ink drawing on paper that resembles a psychedelic mandala made from mystical symbols. It is surrounded by flamelike tendrils in myriad rainbow coloured patterns on a deep blue fluid background. It is called “Coloured drawing (IAMBLICUS)” and is from 1978 by the artist Ann Churchill (b. 1944). It has been painted and drawn on an A4 piece of paper of portrait dimensions. The style of this work is exacting line drawings in pen and black ink that have been painstakingly filled in in technicolour inks. It gives the impression of an obsessive and repetitive process such as crocheting or weaving. As a predominately abstract image there is no accurate objective way of describing the imagery, it is mainly repetitive patterns that inspire free association.

It could be that in the centre of the drawing is a star-like mandala with a dark pupil-like nucleus full of thorny interlinking branches. This has been surrounded by a necklace of interlinking eye-like shapes. The edges of these eyes have been painted to resemble rainbow ribbon and float above a tie dye orb.

At the top and bottom of this central mandala, are intricate patterns of interlinking monochromatic type patterns that resemble Celtic knotwork or intricate filigree. They extend the mandala upwards and downwards. Upwards they arch symmetrically with a central multicoloured patchwork flame into a concentric wishbone tip. Downwards they spill between the bottom two eyes of the necklace, resembling the snout or muzzle of an animal, with its cheeks and jowls made from patterns of clouds or waves.

The muzzle/mandala/arch stack is at once intensely abstract and also suggestive of many things. In totality it forms a shape reminiscent of a flame that balances on a triangular form at the bottom of the image. This triangle is filled with patterns that resemble intricate crocheted rainbows. If we consider the triangle a candle and the stack a flame then we can consider this to be surrounded by a cloud of rising heat and smoke that is filled by hundreds of pointed tendrils, floating out like corals and coloured again in rainbow formations. They float in this white bubble that sits within a dark blue inky background.

This image shows a ceramic sculpture by the artist Basil Olton (b.1966). It is the sole focus of the image and fills the majority of the portrait rectangular frame. The sculpture is called “Disturbers of Harmony” and it was made in 2019. In reality the sculpture is 45 x 34 x 30 cm, about the size of a table vase.

The overall form of the artwork suggests an abstracted bottle or vase shape, that could be slumped or broken. It appears to have been made simply from a few slabs of thinly rolled paper clay. Its tapering neck remains open, two slabs leaning against each other to make a flamelike frame. The bottom vessel appears to be one slab rolled into a cup, but with edges that do not join together accurately and slightly slump and warp. The torn edges of the paper clay are obvious and overlapping joins are left exposed. The thin sheets of clay have been screen-printed onto in bright warm colours such as fizzy yellow and a dense pink. The colour is textural and resembles messy sponge marks. Also printed on the bottom section is a body of black text that is mostly illegible and looks like archive sections of old newspapers. It gives the impression of a form made from folded painted newspapers, like a ceramic poke of chips covered in melting ice cream.

This photograph shows a view onto a gallery space at The Turner House Gallery, Penarth, south Wales during the exhibition “On Loss and Damage” . This exhibition was on from 14 April – 4 June 2023 and was curated by Bob Gelsthorpe (ECG 2022).

It is a traditional white cube style gallery space with three artworks within it. The gallery walls are white and the floor is wooden. The artworks are a mixture of modern and traditional art. Directly in front of us is an installation by the artist Rebecca Wyn Kelly called “Cuckoo Land”. The installation is made from detritus found on Aberarth Beach, 2023. A wooden ladder is hung from the ceiling and strung with several old and faded buoys and thick frayed green blue rope. In this photo we can only see the bottom of the installation.

Looking through this installation we can see two walls of the gallery space. On the left-hand wall there is a wall-based digital collage. It is by the artist Terry Setch and called “Internettide”. It consists of digitally manipulated images of the artist and of the textures of flotsam and jetsam that one might find washed in on the tide on the beach. These digital images have been blown up to large-scale poster size and installed on the wall in a huge floor to ceiling ‘s bend. In this photo we are seeing the artwork from a distance and are missing much of the details of the image. On the right-hand wall there is a small framed painting by the Impressionist artist Alfred Sisley. It is called “The Cliff at Penarth, Evening, Low Tide”. It is oil on canvas and was painted in 1897. In this photo we are seeing the image from across the gallery so we cannot see any detail, but it is possible to see that there is a diagonal division across the painting, with the bottom right triangular section being a dark cliff and the top left being a lighter toned sky and sea background.