Introduction
Ceal Floyer’s oeuvre is characterized by a distinct voice: exuding a quiet but forceful presence, her works address us with playfulness and profundity. Slight alterations to found objects that are usually familiar from everyday experiences create surprising interventions that heighten the awareness of our surroundings. Often the artist mixes visual and linguistic references, combining semantic levels in a disorienting and witty way. Her work achieves a profoundly paradoxical condition: feather-light gravitas.
Ceal Floyer’s presentation responds to the recently opened space by subtly disrupting the self-evidence of its architecture. With simple gestures she proposes breaks or slippages in the existing rooms, toying with our perception of walls, floors and windows as anything but stable. In the main exhibition space, a large, serrated metal blade protrudes from the parquet floor. A fine circular mark completes the work, suggesting a hole is being cut into the floor from below. Drawing on the iconographic trope from cartoons, Saw, 2015 dramatically undermines the trust in the permanence of the ground on which we stand and generally take for granted. Installed on the wall alongside Saw is Jigsaw, a new work, that consists of twelve framed graphite drawings, each depicting a single blank puzzle piece. Isolated on a blank page, the individual pieces will never meet, the jigsaw puzzle never be solved.
In the adjoining space, small tear lines discreetly edge the walls. Untitled Installation (Dotted Line), 1993-2022 is an early example of Floyer’s minimal, witty spatial interventions. The broken line resembles “cut-here” markings on a sheet of paper or a sewing pattern. First conceived in 1993, the work has been updated to include the image of scissors on a digital display—it is the image of the scissors that gives a new significance to the dotted line.
In the second room a video and a sound work subtly interact: presented on a large LED screen, the 2013 Drop consists of a deceptively still image of the evening sky. The video shows a number of drops of water hanging precariously from a horizontal railing that runs across the top of the frame. In the course of the 11:18-minute duration of the video, several of the drops fill up, drop, and new ones form. Oddly transfixing, the extremely slow transformation alters the viewer’s perception of elapsing time and of the scale.
Ceal Floyer’s 2018 sound sculpture, Untitled (Static) is a classic example of the artist’s use of suggestion, recasting familiar perceptions into an unexpected experience. The sculpture is a parabolic speaker that is suspended from the ceiling and plays ready-made static sound effects. The combination of the sight of the clear plastic dome and the sound of the static provokes a trompe l’oreille effect as the noise seems to transform into the patter of heavy rain upon an umbrella.
Another work subverting our understanding of the solidity of the space is Hinges, 2021. Two metal hinges, installed in a corner give the impression that the two adjoining walls could be moved in relation to one another. Characteristic of Floyer’s economical and playful approach, Hinges momentarily changes how we perceive our surroundings in a lasting and even slightly surreal way.
A companion piece of sort is Umbrella, 2018, a photograph depicting a large black umbrella, unfolded and lying upside down on a grey concrete floor. Tilted at a slight angle, it is filled with water, taking up a large section of the concave shape, still and level with the floor. From a convex shield pointing toward the sky to protect from the rain, the characteristic shape has been transformed into a receptacle. Represented indoors, the question of how the liquid has accumulated inside the umbrella creates an intractable visual puzzle.