CERTAINTY//MAYBE
Oktavia Schreiner and Murphy Scoular
25th March — 16th April 2023
Generator Projects was excited to bring new works by Glasgow based artists Oktavia Schreiner and Murphy Scoular. Both artists explore boundary spaces and the ways humans impose order on the world, drawing on lived experience, otherness and outsider perspectives. Scoular is interested in challenging the distinction between natural and unnatural, linking this to Queer theory and narratives of control; in Schreiner’s work, visitors are invited to consider divisions between religion and science, proof and fiction.
Exhibition
25/26 Mid Wynd
Oktavia Schereiner
Oktavia Schreiner was raised in a scientific, atheist family in Berlin and moved as a child to a mediaeval, Catholic town in Southern Italy where, to understand her surroundings, she began to make up her own religion. Schreiner became fascinated with rituals and how these affect the way that people live. Her ceramic sculptures still explore different modes of understanding, straddling logic and ‘fiction’; truth and knowledge.
A large archway sits in the centre of Schreiner’s exhibition, creating a transition between two ways of thinking and interpreting the world. In the first half of the room, two large earthenware columns mark the religious realm.
Less transparency, more magic, their inscriptions read. Not running into freedom. The words written onto the colourful clay can be read in any order, different for each visitor’s approach.
The archway itself signifies the transition between the religious, emotional side and the scientific side. Inside are ceramic sculptures of forget-me-nots, an important symbol for Schreiner, representing vessels containing memories.
The far side of the gallery represents science and order. The invention of religion and the order of the planetoids is a single sculpture, drawing influence from planetary diagrams and a desire for humankind to understand their position in the cosmos and beyond the known world. Each planet holds imagery from the religion that Schreiner invented in Italy as a child.
Next to this piece is Confession. Decorated with depictions of Adam and Eve, this sculpture is like the forbidden apple, leading to consciousness and knowledge. Split into sections, it allows the visitor to look inside and see beyond the object. There is a confessional hatch cut into the apple vessel which can also be looked through, linking rituals of the confessional to modern day science and practices of therapy. Schreiner is keen to emphasise that there isn’t a hierarchy between these different ways of thinking, but that there are parallels that can be drawn between these ways of examining behaviour and understanding the world.
Murphy Scoular
Murphy Scoular has installed a large sculptural installation. Branches intertwine in a structure drawing influence from the nests of bower birds. This is another sort of archway, but unlike Schreiner, Scoular is not celebrating the difference in modes of thinking. Rather, Scoular aims to encourage visitors to question why distinctions exist and how they might be used to exert power and control behaviour. Scoular’s core belief is that there is no difference between the natural and unnatural.
Scoular argues that conceptual divisions between natural and man-made have been used for hundreds of years to create a hierarchy:. TThe perceived value and complexities of man’s craftsmanship have been used to justify the existence of God and to create the illusion that man is not only separate to but above nature.
Murphy has a core belief that ‘nature’ isn’t real and that it doesn’t exist. They question; when does something stop being natural? Scoular gives an example: If you were in a field and you found a pocket watch, you would know it is man-made because it is complex. This is used to argue the existence of God because it is assumed that an object so complex would need a creator. However, if you compare the pocket watch to a potato, the potato is far more complex. This is less, therefore, about the existence of God, and more about perceptions of value: ‘natural’ is not below ‘created’.
Whilst Scoular’s work is not explicitly about Queer experience, their work challenges how society has been encouraged to view some behaviours, sexualities and identities as less ‘natural’ than others. The pocket watch analogy could also be used to suggest that ‘nature’ These distinctions are widely used to encourage normativity and discriminate against those that do not conform.
Bower birds build nests using found materials in. It is a a feat of complexity that straddlinges natural and unnatural boundaries to create a complicated architectural structure. Scoular explains that building a home despite its unnatural appearance is essentially very Queer, as is finding a home in unlikely places..