Isabel Whittle Jones - on Myth

The myth of Persephone is one that explores hierophagic transformation, the paradox of desire, and  the illusion of control. Tasting the fruits of the otherworld engenders an irreversible shift in identity;  no longer bound to a single realm, Persephone finds herself straddling the margins between the  Earth and the Underworld, and thus, becomes entangled within the liminalities of innocence and  corruption; of knowledge and naivety; of safety and danger. This superposition of the self is echoed  throughout Bianca Vern-Barnett’s Myth, a body of work which allegorises the artist’s complex and  deeply personal experiences with grief, memory, agency, and identity. Emotive and sumptuously  layered, Myth invites the viewer inside the isthmus of the mind, exploring the apertures of existence  through a world of rich texture and gestural abstraction.  

Vern-Barnett approaches her creative practice as though it were a dance between worlds;  painstakingly undulating between the conscious and the subconscious until each piece has been  stratified to completion. Intuitively layering oil paints and charcoal with elements of acrylic spray  paint and collage, she evokes within her works a sense of otherworldliness and circular time. Plumes  of spray paint, for example, inject a hazy, ethereal quality into several pieces, contrasting their vivid  pinks and dramatic blues to suggest a divine rupture of cosmic boundaries. In The Earth Beneath Her, these nebulous forms are particularly unsettling, conjuring the hum of the earth as the ground  breaks open and the meadow is enveloped in dust and disarray. Moreover, impasto textures provide  sculptural interest; thickly applied oil paints break free of their planar constraints, transcending  spatial limits to exist tangibly within the three-dimensional. This visual complexity is then extended  through Vern-Barnett’s use of collage, which provides a graphic counterpoint to her otherwise  intangible forms. Superimposed images of horses, birds, and “god heads”, as the artist affectionately  calls them, are overlain onto painted surfaces, and hand rendered phrases taken from the Homeric  Hymn to Demeter pay reverence to the literary tradition from which these symbols were born.  

Fascinated by the ontology of time, Vern-Barnett challenges the viewer’s understanding of linear  narrative, and time’s elasticity functions as a thematic anchor throughout. The artist punctuates her  works with temporal markers, visually entangling the before, the during and the after. The sun’s  diurnal cycle powerfully exemplifies this erosion of sequence, with suns in various stages of setting  and rising serving to orient the observer within an eternalist reality. Grid-like networks are also  integrated within the fabric of this universe, symbolising an infinite curvature where sequential time  folds in on itself until only the singularity of Myth remains.  

This subversion of conventional time is further paralleled by the works’ own creation: all fifteen  pieces were produced at once, with the artist vacillating between each canvas to cultivate a  collective entity. Positioning the artist as composer, visual ostinatos are reiterated across each  painting, reflecting their fluxed conception and serving as a unifying thread throughout. Dates  pocketed within All Four Gods, Meadow with Time Passed, The Earth Beneath Her, and A Hole  Appeared in the Meadow function as an archival record of the making process, concurrently  suspending each moment in time and collectivising them into one. Several paintings are also  branded with stripes of paint, with each collection of lines serving as chromatic barcodes to  memorialise the colour palettes used in their creation. Moreover, the semiotics of grief are  poignantly explored through the recurring motif oftwo-handled vessels, a symbol thoughtfully  embedded within Slicing Through the Vast Air and Meadow with Time Passed. Functioning as  custodians of the betwixt and the between, Vern-Barnett transmutes these containers into holders of  space; quantum vessels within which grief exists in two states at once, only collapsing into a  perceivable form once its holder is ready to observe it. Furthermore, their twin handles also mirror this sense of plurality, physically embodying the tensions between light and shadow, movement and  inertia, and regeneration and decay.  

Just as Persephone’s journey symbolises eternal transition and cyclical transformation, Myth coalesces the opposing forces of our inner worlds. As she entices the viewer to consume the  forbidden fruit and wander through the katabasis of the mind, Vern-Barnett becomes the architect of  infinite possibility, and one is initiated into an equilibrious state of becoming and unbecoming at  once. Saturated with manifold realities, Myth offers itself as a sanctum of introspection where the  diaphanous boundaries between realms are dissolved, and those who journey through its universe  are afforded the space to rest contentedly between the thresholds of human existence.  

Isabel Whittle-Jones