Faust Haus: Verity Coward

“No, no, not omnipotent, just very well connected”
– Mephistopheles, in Faust (Goethe, 1829).

Working across sculpture, painting & moving-image, Coward’s practice is deeply embedded in material & process. Themes, objects and characters emerge from literature, mythology, folk tales and cartoons and shapeshift between mediums.

In her current work, Coward constructs sculptural scenes (still-lifes and tableaus) in everyday materials such as papermaché and cardboard, and uses these as models to paint from. The paintings carry the vernacular of their material origins, yet allow the subjects to uncannily transform across multiple planes and forms of meaning.

Coward’s paintings are somewhat Cronenbergian in their abject corporeality and tactility. Body parts such as eyeballs, organs, fingers and teeth skewer, split, wrap or butt-up against magnets, hammers, rockets, beds, ladders or even wads of cash. Coward’s process of modelling the subjects first in papermaché bloats and disfigures them, but also gives them potential for a new role and identity. Like Shelley’s Frankenstein, parts of others combine, reform and regenerate to become something new. Clumsy and misshapen, these new ‘creatures’ offer an explicit truth and wisdom. 

The claustrophobic crops and close framing of the subjects forces an unsettling intimacy and awkward sensuality. There is a sinister sense of privacy and placelessness to these works, a feeling of something done in secret and hidden away. Similar to Foucault's notion of ‘Heterotopias’, the otherness is disturbing, intense, incompatible and contradictory. These are worlds within worlds, mirroring and yet upsetting what is familiar and acceptable. Yet there is a dark comedy to the violence of such strange, forced and unlikely pairings; a cruel joke or trick is being played, perhaps even a deal with the Devil. Subject-object hierarchies are dissolved and reinstated in this ongoing game of re-arrangement and play of manipulation, power and agency.