Sriwhana Spong’s first solo show in the United Kingdom, mounted at London’s Pump House Gallery, was the product of the New Zealand artist’s research into von Bingen’s Lingua Ignota. Much like the materials she was probing, the artist’s work often felt fragmented and impenetrable. The exhibition of creations from 2017 began promisingly on the gallery’s first floor with Oirclamisil and Lou, two works in which strips of clay were initially placed onto curving ledges of paraffin wax and wood that protruded from the wall and allowed to warp in reaction to the environment that surrounded them. Visually reminiscent of the 23-letter alphabet von Bingen developed for use with her artificial language, these two mixed-media creations provide a metaphor for the semantic and diachronic flexibility of verbal communication, as well as an incidental but compelling experiment with traditional sculptural materials. Less comprehensible in the context of the show were two accompanying pieces, Sanur #1 and Sanur #2, both of which consist of paraffin wax squares inlaid with french fries and are apparently named after the seaside town in Bali, Indonesia. Although visually compelling and appealingly anarchic in themselves, their incongruousness was jarring.

Another reference to Bali emerged on the gallery’s top floor in a series of paintings titled Sigil (Rothschild’s Mynah) #8 to 13, each of which has a collection of shapes intersect in different shades of saffron yellow, and takes its name from a painted symbol considered to have magical power. Each painting apparently contains the letters found in the alternative name for the Bali Myna, or “Rothschild’s Mynah,” which is an endangered bird native to the Indonesian island. Why this should be the case, however, is unclear, and unlike the amalgams of wax and French fries three floors below, these pictures lack the aesthetic force required to compensate for their conceptual incongruity.

The overabundance of ideas that marred the top floor pieces was equally present in the eponymous film, A Hook But No Fish, captured on 16 mm film and projected on the gallery’s second floor. The 20-minute work displays a series of seemingly unrelated images—lengthy shots of the monastery and surrounding forest where von Bingen was an abbess, a woman perhaps acting as her and considering an egg while subtitles muse on the Lingua Ignota’s origins, throngs of earthworms and pigeons, an account of a woman whose artist ex-partner may or may not have used photographs of her in an exhibition contrary to her will—often set to music and filtered in orange, red or blue. However, perhaps owing to the medium of moving pictures, the scramble of imagery here was more evocative of the mysticism that von Bingen practiced, and so remained coherent with the exhibition where other pieces failed to do so.

On the third floor was Instrument C (Claire), a hanging aluminum bell plate flanked by two palm fronds found in Battersea Park, where Pump House Gallery is located. The piece apparently reflects the Balinese Gamelan tradition of having the pitch of each instrument in a musical orchestra correspond to a specific village, and on the wall opposite there hung a long dress, HZ Dress C, whose saturated shade of almost International Klein blue corresponds in a way that is not made clear to the tone of the bell plate in Instrument C (Claire). While the depth of this particular hue is appealing, it exposed a flaw in A Hook But No Fish: too often, oversaturation begot shallowness. A focused musing on Bali, von Bingen, endangered birds or indecipherable words would be welcome, but all together they yield only esotery without mystic appeal.

Ned Carter Miles is ArtAsiaPacific’s London desk editor.

Sriwhana Spong’s “A Hook But No Fish” is on view at Pump House Gallery, London, until April 01, 2018.

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