Emma Hart/Jockum Nordström, Camden Arts Centre - exhibition review

In Emma Hart's superb Dirty Looks she captures the messiness of the body and the chaos of the mind, while in Jockum Nordström's show his works are slower burning — he has a knack for creating atmospheres that are both compelling and unsettling
Emma Hart, Dirty Looks (work in progress) ‘Clipboard’, 2013. Courtesy the artist. Emma Hart, Dirty Looks (work in progress) ‘Clay Napkins’ 2013. Courtesy the artist.
2 April 2014

★★★★☆

Emma Hart is the antidote to the cool, detached minimalist or conceptual artist. Not for her the spare, enigmatic hangs so common in galleries — her installations assault the senses with clutter and cacophony.

In Dirty Looks, Hart has created an office-like environment full of chipboard cupboards and drawers and invaded the space with videos and sculpture. Recently bewitched by the wonders of clay, she began making tongues, crudely spotted with pink, red and black glaze. The show is infested with them — they protrude from cupboards as door handles, loom lasciviously over ceramic clipboards and loop hilariously around napkins. She has also created cartoonish clay mouths from which the tongues loll and droop, as well as ceramic buckets and water cooler taps.

Hart’s videos and sound are similarly arresting, with abrupt coughing and incessant chatter providing a cacophonous soundtrack. The films appear where you least expect them — on top of the cupboards or from beneath ceramic photo frames.

In one, an animated pair of teeth spout gibberish inspired by the call centre where Hart once worked, while another sees a sequence of gargoyles accompanied by a voiceover which sounds like someone looking at a identity parade: “No, not that one.” All around the ceramics and within the films are images of flowers and berries, cliched photos of natural beauty amid the grotesqueness.

Hart captures the messiness of the body and the chaos of the mind as they tackle everyday life with an original and suitably excessive language — this is a superb show.

★★★☆☆

Jockum Nordström’s collages, drawings and sculptures in All I Have Learned and Forgotten Again are slower burning. At first, they appear naive, like an outsider artist’s work with their vivid imagination and crude style — it’s no surprise that Nordström has published children’s books in his native Sweden.

But his themes here are decidedly adult. In settings which veer from modern housing blocks to brooding landscapes and historical harbours and interiors, people and animals are joined in surreal tableaux which have a certain charm yet teem with mystery and sexual and violent imagery, a world in which the relationships between the protagonists are always shifting and uncertain.

Though I find his self-consciously folky style rather grating, there’s no doubt that Nordström has a knack for creating atmospheres that are both compelling and unsettling.

Until September 29 (020 7472 5500, camdenartscentre.org)

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