Alex Sudheim : On show in Durban
‘I am a visual poet,” says Deryck Healey. Trite as it may superficially sound, once immersed in his art and his nature, one realises this brief epithet is really the only one that fits. There is a quality in Healey’s work, and in his approach to making it, that is so fluidly synonymous with the creation of poetry that he lays claim to the title more convincingly than any contemporary artist I’ve seen in a good while.
There is an aspect of his art that triggers soft explosions inside you in a way that transcends language and is impossible to describe. Some kind of evanescent blow to the soul that reminds you of something you once felt, or thought you did, or wanted to, or thought you wanted to … a quick shadow thrown by something you’ve never really been able to grasp or explain.
And Healey’s restlessness of spirit is always leading him to dicover radically new ways to express himself, much to his agent’s exasperation. “You don’t have a signature style, a trademark form,” complains his agent; “no one’s ever going to be able to walk into a room and instantly say ‘Oh, that’s a Deryck Healey.'” In fact, his London agent was rather opposed to his foray to Durban, convinced he wasn’t going to sell a thing. “I don’t care,” said Healey, “I’m coming because I need to, and that’s worth more than money.”
Healey’s only concern is the ongoing odyssey of trying to discover himself, in all its contradictory, fractured glory, and it’s this which has brought him back to South Africa after so many years. Born and raised in Umhlali on KwaZulu-Natal’s north coast, Healey obtained a fine arts diploma from the Natal Technikon in Durban. Soon thereafter he went abroad, where he spent two decades making a name for himself with shows in New York, London, Osaka, Los Angeles and Venice. He is currently professor of colour at the Royal College of Art in London. Yet part of him always wanted to come back, to find traces of himself left behind.
His project has taken the shape of 17 man- sized resin sculptures, each one of which Healey has manipulated to read like a profound essay in the mysteries of memory, existence, ruin and beauty. “All my works are ultimately self-portraits,” he says, “but I wanted to make them on another figure, an impersonal body whose form is everlasting, and put my memories on to it.”
Heavily influenced by the idealised depictions of the human form found in Greek Kouros sculpture, Healey has taken the medium further by subjecting each figure to subtle devastation, symbolising the twin diodes of universal and personal experience.
Like William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, each sculpture tells the same story twice, with the front of the figure depicting the disturbing inversion of story told on the other side, hence the exhibition’s title Back to Front.
Me Two tells the story of a boy at play in his imagination. Yet from behind the figure is charred flesh (an effect created by melting black rubbish bags) with two police-confiscated homemade guns pinned to his waist.
One of the most incredible pieces is Money Man, where Healey has welded the two back portions of bodies together, creating the vivid impression of two people having crashed into each other and fused. One body-half is covered in shredded banknotes, with the other enveloped in cut-outs from art and fashion magazines. “It’s art fucking money and vice versa,” says Healey simply of the piece.
Then there’s the visceral intensity of Split Man, the resin of the split figure caked with human hair, sheet rubber and split pins. Beached Man is studded with bottle-tops, shells and assorted seaside junk. Talk to Me Man bristles with telephone wire and conductors. Hurt Man’s resin body is laced with crushed glass.
The way one’s childhood experiences impact upon one’s life forever is an important theme for Healey. “When I was a boy in Umhlali I used to walk along the beach and gather everything I could find,” he says, and this avid delight in finding random objects and integrating them into his work echoes that childish yen.
In stories told with humour, warmth, honesty and dread, he shows us that stumbling blindly through the limbo between existentialist terror and gleeful abandon is the only place to be.
— Back to Front by Deryck Healey is on show at the NSA Gallery in Durban until May 26