‘I’ve fixed my feelings into durable words / when they could have been spent on tenderness.’ So writes Jorge Luis Borges in his poem ‘Almost a Last Judgement’, which evokes his nocturnal walks through the barrios of Buenos Aires. The poem belongs to Borges’s later period, as he began to lose his eyesight – an interesting premise for an exhibition of photographs and film.
For Borges, the loss of sight prompted a deeper exploration of memory and his own mind. For six artists presented in Tender Looks too, mining the personal world can be revelatory starting point for viewing the outside – a relinquishing of photography’s desire to control the world.
Tender Looks at Tenderbooks features the work of six emerging artists and describes a shared sensibility: for the exhibition’s curator, the artist Benedict Brink, softness refers both to an approach to making images – she frequently employs a soft-focus lens – and her relationship with her subjects.
Five new works by Brink centre on gauzy representations of female bodies – both flesh and stone, blurring the real and mythologised, beatific and profane – as totems of feminine tenderness. ‘I’m interested in taking things that are meant to be important — an epic landscape, geological anomaly or historical artefact for instance, and presenting it in soft focus. Or taking something so small, like a close-up of a body, and blowing it up in the frame to the point of abstraction, where it is able to transcend and become something else,’ Brink says.
The female body’s potential to harbour and evoke tenderness is explored too in Tessa Silva’s ongoing series Feminised Protein, a project the artist embarked on in 2015. Using surplus milk sourced from a raw organic dairy farm in Sussex, Silva sculpts biomorphic vessels, their silken, bulging forms paying homage to the way milk is made and contained in bodies, while the material connects to an ancient and universal symbolism, a herstory of acts of care that have ensured the continuation of species. ‘Milk products do not typically represent the realities of milk processes — seeping bodies and severance,’ she says. ‘The forms I create allow milk to recouple to the mammal: corporeal, living, reactionary.’
Connected with Silva’s concerns, a suite of photographs titled ‘Felicité’ by Pauline Hisbacq documents her experience of early motherhood, portraying in a wistful and nostalgic style the essence of nurture as tenderness: an attempt ‘to capture the depth of love that lies between us’.
Weaving between these personal and collective visions, zooming in and out on bodies, Tender Looks proposes a way of seeing – one that’s softer, gentler and offers a much-needed salve for the toughness of our times.
‘Tender Looks’ runs at Tenderbooks, 24 Feb–2 March. For more information, visit tenderbooks.co.uk
