Laura Facey’s “Laboratory of the Ticking Heart” and Ormsby Hall

Laura Facey’s latest solo exhibition, The Laboratory of the Ticking Heart, is on view at Ormsby Hall, 3 Victoria Avenue, in downtown Kingston, until July 10. I had the opportunity to view it twice: the first time on the day before the official opening, while the final touches were being put to the initial installation (as I was traveling the next day), and the second time after the exhibition was re-curated and reinstalled last week.

The Laboratory of the Ticking Heart presents work that was produced between 2018 and 2022 and includes large and smaller wood sculptures, as well as large pastel drawings and small hand-touched prints. It draws from several recent bodies of work, such as the Sanctuary: Land of Look Behind (2018) suite, which alludes to the contested historical and present-day significance and politics that surround the Cockpit Country and involves an urgent call for its conservation.

The gigantic, 25 feet tall Zinc Walking Tree (2018), one of several such Walking Trees, stands outside Ormsby Hall, near the main entrance, and provides an intriguing and inviting connection with what is on view indoors, while also juxtaposing the hard geometric urbanity of the building with the organic, natural forms of the tree. The sculpted form of the tree and its title, however, also refer to the iconic urban structure of the zinc fence. It was Rex Nettleford, I believe, who said that Kingston is a city with a rural underbelly. The Zinc Walking Tree also alludes to complex interconnectedness of the rural and urban in Jamaican life, which has shaped much of its social and cultural life, and its conflicts and tensions, historically and in the present.

The exhibition, however, grants centre stage to a group of newer sculptures and large drawings that feature the human heart, represented in formal shorthand but with the essential anatomical characteristics provocatively recognizable. The title of the exhibition is taken from a poem by Laura’s grandmother, Jullia Rypinski, and speaks to the volatility and contradictions of the human heart, as the symbolic site of our emotions. The central group of three large guango sculptures, The Three Graces: Laboratory of the Ticking Heart (2022), have the enigmatic, ceremonial presence of ancient sacred sculptures and ask, according to the accompanying text, whether we are creating or destroying by how we express our feelings, a fundamental existential question at the individual and collective levels.

Another work in this group, Memorial: Guide Their Way Home, Altars of Our Hearts, Our Children, Our children’s Children (2021), of which seven of ten parts are shown in the exhibition (the full work will be shown in the upcoming Kingston Biennial), speaks about the intergenerational traumas that have shaped Jamaica. The work consists of carved plinths on which, to quote the label, “hundreds of wooden hearts” are displayed, some of them blood red, others blackened and even charred. This installation is simultaneously stunningly beautiful but also has a troubling, violent quality to it, with inevitable references to sacrifice and genocide. While the wall text calls for healing and letting go of past trauma, the messages conveyed by the work itself are far more conflicted and tormented, leaving one to wonder whether reconciliation is in fact possible.

Dealing effectively with space and scale is a major curatorial challenge in exhibitions where large and small works must co-exist, and this is even harder in a space which is more suitable for large-scale interventions. This is not only a matter of strategizing the works effectively in that space, but also of making wise selections. Less is almost always more when it comes to art exhibitions and this is where the exhibition, at least in its original layout, had some problems. There was just too much to see, without a well-choreographed structure that reflects the logic of the work and the space. There was also too much staging, for instance, with the coloured theatrical lighting and the greenery that was being attached to the platform on which the Land of Look Behind suite was initially shown (which, I was told, referred to the camouflage traditions of the Maroons). The two small rooms to the either side of the stage were even more cluttered with the smaller sculptures.

Part of this may have to do with the fact that The Laboratory of the Ticking Heart is also a sales exhibition, as there may have been a desire to offer work at different sizes and price points. The small prints that were mounted in different sections of the hall seemed quite redundant from a curatorial perspective, however, and could have been made available to the public in a portfolio, and the smaller sculptures could have been included more selectively. Last week’s re-installation of the exhibition suggests that these curatorial issues were recognized. The reorganized installation I saw on my second visit is indeed a vast improvement, with greater clarity and oversight, and makes much better use of the formal dialogues between the large sculptures and drawings, and the expansive, formally and historically resonant space.

The tendency to over-stage is however also evident in the rather lengthy, visually intrusive exhibition texts, and its insistent calls for reconciliation, unity and healing are rather preachy. The work itself speaks a far more visceral, contradictory, and multi-layered language and I wish that it would be allowed to speak for itself, with less explanatory interference. There is only a thin line between explanation and justification and the exhibition texts, at times, shade into the latter. If there is anything I would like to say to Laura on that count, it is to have more confidence in the magnificent, if complicated, sensory, emotive, and allusive power of her work, to trust her artistic voice and intuition, and her formidable technical and imaginative skills, and to embrace the social and cultural tensions and contradictions that surround her art, and her person, as part of the very dynamic that produces the work.

Dr Veerle Poupeye is an art historian specialized in art from the Caribbean. She lectures at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, and works as an independent curator, writer, researcher, and cultural consultant. Her personal blog can be found at veerlepoupeye.com.