Photos in ‘Marked By Light’ Unlock Stories of Interiority
At Serchia Gallery, Bristol, four artists expose the universality of nature and time through personal allegory.
‘Marked by Light’, Installation view, 2024. Courtesy: © Serchia Gallery; photograph: Will Moss
Contributor credits: Nshan Melkonian is the creator of InCulture, and is an art writer and Gallery Supervisor at Spike Island Contemporary Art Centre in Bristol, England.
25 years ago photographer Agnieszka Sosnowska took a trip to Reykjavík, Iceland, which serendipitously would trace out an unexpected path in life. Since then, Sosnowska’s experiences of living in a natural milieu, based in a remote Kleppjárnsstaðir farm in East Iceland, have materialised in her latest monograph ‘För’, published by Trespasser. Here, she documents rural life in her adopted home, wraith-like persons, and mythic Icelandic lands that unearth an intricate ecosystem. ‘Marked By Light’ is an amalgam of photos. Sosnowska makes up only a quarter of it while the rest is split between Yana Wernicke, Kiowa Casey, and Giulia Vanelli. Together they function as a novel-esque ensemble performing, each illustrating a different chapter which narrates a tribute to nature, familial bonds, and cherished places called home.
Agnieszka Sosnowska, För, monograph, 2024. Courtesy: © the artist and Village Books
This show, deftly curated by Christine Serchia for Bristol Photo Festival 2024, has a mellifluence to it. There is music permeating the space. At first glance, the gallery looks like a retrospective peppered with black-and-white photos; however, closer examination reveals more than one artist. Sosnowska’s Arnie's Pets (2024) appears from the second room like an enigmatic cipher. A smoky sky riddled with light projects a girl grasping two ducks, one hanging from her left wrist, which simultaneously clutches the other high upon her chest—the first looks asphyxiated by her caress. It is difficult to know if, or which one, is alive. The water mirrors everything and nothing, excavating a grey chasm beneath and beyond her. Sosnowska presents the reality of agrarian life and thoughtfully questions her connection to the land.
Agnieszka Sosnowska, Arnie's Pets, 2024. Courtesy: © the artist and Serchia Gallery
Sosnowska’s casting of three subjects—a girl, animals, and a landscape—coalesces with Yana Wernicke’s series Companions, which features the close bonds between Rosina and Julie, and the farm animals that they rescue in Germany. These women intend to mend interspecies relationships, and Wernicke’s eye-catching photo Rosina with Mira, Milo and Mika #2 (2023) explores this sentiment. Rosina is lying down and her upper body appears convincingly subsumed by geese, evolving into a character of folkloric anthropomorphism. They lay nestled in a bed of perforated paper grass, and the neck of one goose softly contours her left arm while another bows, lining its eye with that of Rosina’s and the viewer. Julie and No Name #1 (2023) proves equally emotive by centring grass and Julie—out of camera focus—in-between both animals. Wernicke’s candid photos present either coexistence or dissonance and speak in declaratives about modern ethics and humanity's ecological bond.
Yana Wernicke, Julie and No Name #1, 2023. Courtesy: © the artist and Serchia Gallery
Yana Wernicke, Rosina with Mira, Milo and Mika #2, 2023. Courtesy: © the artist and Serchia Gallery
There is unbridled realism to Kiowa Casey and Giuliani Vanelli's photography; from intimate tellings of family and the loss of Casey’s mother in San Amado, to obscure portraits in Giuliani’s series The Season. Vanelli’s Untitled (#1, all works untitled, 2024) is a testament to this quality. An anonymous figure breaks the fourth wall. Pulsating in a soft luminescence, the translucent man cradles his right ear as if anticipating an anecdote from the viewer; on the other hand, Untitled (#4) willingly communicates one. The shell cupped in a palm carries a serrated penumbra and invokes a splintery sensation like the spicules of a sea sponge. A window is opened by this childlike activity, documenting Vanelli’s youth memories and reflections on time that she states ‘can be both comforting or claustrophobic, depending on the circumstances.’
Giulia Vanelli, Untitled (#1), 2024. Courtesy: © the artist and Serchia Gallery
Giulia Vanelli, Untitled (#4), 2024. Courtesy: © the artist and Serchia Gallery
That paradoxical sensibility is hung high in Casey’s Towels (2024). There is an endearing sorrow to the clothesline. An existential mark that manifests within her compositions— sometimes intuited or, many a time felt like a juddering undercurrent below the surface. Louis (2024) brings this notion further to head with Louis behind a pane of glass. A smudge resembles a scar arched atop his brow, a fleshy motif of circumstance and enduring strength. At her best, her photos offer a joie de vivre amidst life’s hardships and tenderly pays homage to the physical and/or visceral distance experienced amongst family, but more importantly, the love that transcends it. Whether Sosnowska’s adoptive home of Iceland, Vanelli’s Tuscany seaside dwelling, or Casey’s Welsh abode, each photo recounts halcyon days that once felt possibly infinite, yet now, with time’s acceleration and maturity, feels transient and weighted behind ironed melancholy.
Kiowa Casey, Louis, 2024. Courtesy: © the artist and Serchia Gallery
Kiowa Casey, Towels, 2024. Courtesy: © the artist and Serchia Gallery
Upon opening Casey’s San Amado a single phrase dedicated to her mother reads, ‘Our home is not on the earth but in the light.’ Something mystically ubiquitous; light is a primordial essence which webs through everything's origin story. The exhibit embodies this concept. It is rooted in universal themes; howbeit, on the surface, it offers the simultaneity of present and past through photography. Their archetypal images leave an imprint on our collective conscience. And after vicariously living through them, I set off, knowing they have been forever engraved on the dark side of my mind.
‘Marked By Light’ is on view at Serchia Gallery, Bristol, until 20 December 2024.
All exhibition poster proceeds are going to the artist’s nominated Charities: Winston’s Wish, RSPCA (Bristol), Action Aid, and Julie and Rosina Espig Animal Sanctuary.
