Victoria Cantons: What Birds Plunge Through Is Not The Intimate Space

Guts Gallery is excited to present ‘What Birds Plunge Through Is Not The Intimate Space,’ a solo show by Victoria Cantons which explores themes of desire, loss, time and the function of language through a distinctly literary lens.

Taking its title from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘What Birds Plunge Through is not The Intimate Space’ investigates interpersonal relationships and the ways in which we fit into the world around us. For Cantons, the ‘empty’ spaces between people and things are charged with an intense energy and power; for it is these spaces that give people and things their individual form. In the poem from which the exhibition takes its name, Rilke says that: “Space reaches from us and construes the world: / to know a tree, in its true element, / throw inner space around it, from that pure / abundance in you.” Throughout the exhibition, Cantons makes the spaces between things the centrepiece of her practice.

Throughout the show, canvases are dominated by vast swathes of a liberally applied, off-white wash. Pieces are then populated by moments of intense, gestural paintwork in the oozing, blood red flowers or measured, carefully crafted and heavily symbolic depictions of various ancient objects such as a bust of Apollo, an amphora and a soldier’s helmet. Across each work, lines from poems by a vast array of both ancient and modern writers such as Leonard Cohen, TS Eliot, Ted Hughes, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Monahan, Ovid, Joshua Rivkin and Shakespeare are scrawled in Cantons’ distinctive hand. These inscriptions are imbued with a twofold meaning: as writing, they become affirmations, reminders to treat oneself and others with respect and reverence. However, taken on a purely visual basis, the pace at which these words were written transforms them into dynamic and expressive gestural marks. 

Cantons folds a life’s worth of art obsessions into ‘What Birds Plunge Through Is Not The Intimate Space.’ Throughout the show, she wears her artistic debts and influences on her sleeve. Cantons doesn’t try to throw off the world she was born into, instead, she holds it as close as one can. The result is a show that is a celebration of life; Cantons demonstrates exceptional joie de vivre as she brings together, interrogates and reshapes the art and literary works that have played a key role in her self-actualisation as an artist. However, for Cantons it is not just the works of art, books and people that transform and elevate daily life, it is the spaces between those things too.