Erica Eyres @ Queens Park Railway Club, Glasgow

One top half of a finger, an anatomically rendered heart and a cleanly severed hand are some of the forms taken by Erica Eyres’ small ceramic sculptures in her Queens Park Railway Club exhibition, Alone and I. Over sculpture and video, Eyres sidesteps the abject shock response that might be expected to the severed feet and hand sculptures or the video work’s verbal description of the exsanguination of her mother. 

At points the smooth shine of her ceramics give way to a pumice surface. On the entrails that take up most of one the shelves, this roughness just at the tops of the pipe forms gives a twin sense of body horror melodrama and the dull disgust cum disappointment of dried out food. In place of a gusty revulsion, there’s a hint at the fascination of gory form and the small irritations of icky kitchen cycles.

Eyres also breaks the bright sleek shine of small, vividly red-coloured blood drop sculptures, though instead of rough bubbled texture she draws into them. Their frowns and wobbly grins begin to track a sense of nuanced anxiety or being ill-at-ease.

In the video itself, Eyres’ tells the story of having a mother who has had her blood taken 138 times. Delivered with pauses that switch between loaded suspense and time for making up the next turn of events, at different points she describes serious bodily harms and soapy romances between her mother and a handsome doctor. The setting is the mossy inside of the drained Govanhill Baths.

Like the rest of the show, suggestions of extreme bodily states or situations are delivered through cooler means, or in forms that are not usually used to perform overt trauma. Instead a surprisingly sinister tension is allowed to linger and permeate through the prosthetics and sometimes stagey ceramic props. 

---

Erica Eyres, Alone and I, until 15 Oct, Queens Park Railway Club