Tactics of abstraction and embodiment through Spence Messih

Spence Messih is an artist living and working on Gadigal land (Sydney, Australia). Their practice speaks broadly to sites of pressure, power structures, materiality and language and more specifically about these things in relation to their own experience. Their work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Artspace, and ALASKA Projects, Sydney; the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne; and Auto Italia, London, among others. They recently completed their PhD at UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture.

This conversation took place in February 2022 on the occasion of Spence Messih’s exhibition Lectus.

Interview by M.Sunflower, Co-Director, Firstdraft, 2021–22.

M.Sunflower: What does the title Lectus mean?

Spence Messih: The exhibition takes its title from the Latin word lectus, past participle of legere, ‘to read’ which translates into English as ‘lectern’. While the design of the lectern has changed over time it has remained to be an apparatus that enables the speaker to stand behind a structure and place reading materials on its slanted ledge, all of which assist in maintaining eye contact with an audience. I was particularly drawn to the definition of lector in Latin, meaning ‘the one who reads’, whether silently or aloud and how voice can refer to a sound, an agency or an expressed position of a group of people.

Spence Messih holding Wet things dry, dry things get wet from Tender rip, Auto Italia South East, London, 2019. Courtesy the artist.

Spence Messih, Cinder, 2021, stained glass, 44 × 54 cm, installation view, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy the artist.

MS: This exhibition was the culmination of your PhD. What were you exploring in your research?

SM: My research project asks how abstract art practices, when considered in the context of trans visibility and representation, can be a way of newly understanding the social, political and ethical forces that animate trans embodiment. I explored this idea of living within the space of social and political abstraction as a generative stance that is not only concerned with resisting or responding to terms that are imposed from elsewhere – I was thinking about how material abstraction can be used as a tactic for claiming presence within absence, self-recognition within misrecognition and opacity within obscurity.

“My practice at large explores themes of transparency and recognition through a focus on formal relations, material differences and interdisciplinary pairing.”

MS: What ideas are you exploring in the exhibition?

SM: My practice at large explores themes of transparency and recognition through a focus on formal relations, material differences and interdisciplinary pairing. In Lectus, these themes have been further explored via the textual and tonal differences in glass that omit or transmit light, through focusing on the relations created between individual shapes, and through exploring the connections that arise in the coupling of text and leadlight.

Spence Messih, Idyll I–III, 2021, stained glass, 70 × 50 cm, installation view (detail), Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy the artist. 

“My research project asks how abstract art practices, when considered in the context of trans visibility and representation, can be a way of newly understanding the social, political and ethical forces that animate trans embodiment.”

Spence Messih, Sinew I–II, 2021, stained glass, 44 × 34 cm, installation view, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy the artist.

“I was particularly drawn to the definition of ‘lector’ in Latin, meaning ‘the one who reads’, whether silently or aloud and how voice can refer to a sound, an agency or an expressed position of a group of people.”

MS: Why do the qualities of glass and in particular stained glass as a medium appeal to you? What does the history inherent in the stained glass communicate in your work?

SM: Historically, stained glass and leadlight works have depicted fables, legends, myths, biblical themes, spiritual messages and scenes from daily life. These scenes have often explored moments of struggle between good and evil. Narratives depicted in stained glass often aim to shine light (both physically and spiritually) onto certain ‘truths’ and provide hope and a path forward for those in their presence. I’m drawing on the historical use of stained glass and leadlight as a narrative tool in religious environments as well as how the state and its miniatures (religious, medical and legal systems, social norms and policing) simultaneously absorb and exclude certain bodies. Lectus explores architectures that promise protection – for example the church, the medical waiting room or trans mutual support groups – and how this sense of safety often depends on one’s ability to forfeit their privacy and be surveilled, both by others and ourselves. The series of leadlight works contain scenes of interruption, relation and moments of coming into or out of recognisability.

As an architectural feature, glass demarcates space and the publics and privates, insides and outsides, that afford (or preclude) protection. Glass has a unique material ability to both conceal and reveal as windows enable mutual surveillance and raise questions as to who is protected from who. Glass is vulnerable to weathering, particularly to heat and humidity, the very forces that helped to make it. It is also able to withstand sites of pressure, such as the small body of a bird, pelting rain or a rogue rock and shows no unsteadiness from the force of a persistent gaze. Made of a mixture of sand, soda and lime, glass is dynamic, in continual material transformation. For example, with the passing of time panes of glass become thicker at their base, sometimes even slipping out of their frames.

Glass also contains memory – from the unique impressions made by the breath of the glassblower to the molecules around the site of a score: it is said that when glass is scored in order to be cut, certain molecules within it scatter away from the shallow graze of the blade and temporarily return to their liquid memory, making it easier to break. There is a small window of time in which to break the piece, and after that the molecules rejoin underneath the score. Now scarred, the piece remains just as strong as before the score was made. (Fact or fiction, physics or folk, these qualities of glass and leadlight were shared with me at a stained glass workshop in Ely, UK). In these ways, glass is about relation – to itself and to the external pressures of bodies, and its environments – the meeting, or withholding, of weather, an unwanted visitor, the reflection of one’s own face.

Spence Messih, Idyll I–III, 2021, stained glass, 70 × 50 cm, installation view (detail), Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy the artist.

“Glass contains memory”

MS: Can you tell us about the colours you used in the exhibition?

SM: The individual works are in different shades of amber and purple glass – two colours that are often confused in dim light. I used these works to play with ideas of misrecognition, signal mutual recognisability and solidarity with certain viewers while still maintaining their own privacy.

“I used these works to play with ideas of misrecognition, signal mutual recognisability and solidarity with certain viewers while still maintaining their own privacy.”

Vincent Silk, Fibre Portraits, 2021, inkjet paper, installation view (detail), Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy the artist.

MS: You’ve worked with writer Vincent Silk who wrote Fibre Portraits in Lectus. Can you share how this process works? What does this collaboration bring to your conceptual development, and at what stage in the process?

SM: Vincent is an old friend of mine and we’ve worked together in this kind of way before – both vibing off each other’s practice. Fibre Portraits developed out of a series of conversations that circled around dogeared hymn books from my childhood, the precariousness of language, the capacity of leadlight, moments of transfiguration and the rarity of finding recognition in spaces that promise solidarity. I felt ambivalent trying to illustrate the themes of the sonnets through a series of sketches, particularly through depictions of the figurative body. This felt especially true when working with a medium like stained glass, where the image either becomes hyperreal through the painted or etched surface or comic-like when glass and lead alone are used to depict an image. By recalling the major themes of my research – finding presence in absence, self-recognition in misrecognition and opacity in obscurity – I realised that what I wanted to say through this body of work could not be achieved through the depiction of the physical body alone. Rather, I was interested in gestures, textures and the relations between forms. I began focusing on the ways that meaning and recognition can exist abstractly through the materiality of glass and lead, while being in close relationship to Fibre Portraits. The six leadlight works and their relationship to Vincent’s sonnets contain layers of meaning through the process of interpretation, reinterpretation and misinterpretation: from Vincent responding to my original ideas to a process of reinterpreting or un-interpreting his poetry into glass. The words of Fibre Portraits appear happily lost in the gestural lines of the leadlight works. Both works seek to describe, rather than define, not just themselves but each other.

“Both works seek to describe, rather than define, not just themselves but each other.”

Spence Messih, Lectus, 2021, installation view, Firstdraft, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy the artist.

“By engaging with the politics of abstraction I have found a spaciousness that can coexist with the presence of language and gestural forms, and figurative depictions of bodies, however vague they appear.”

MS: Looking back at your previous bodies of work, can you describe how Lectus fits.

SM: Over the last years I’ve been working with steel, glass, leadlight and text to explore notions of safety and security – or its lack – in conversation with notions of transparency, opacity, fragility and strength. These qualities are never positioned as each other’s ‘opposites’ but rather as inseparable, in non-opposition. The durability of leadlight windows depends on the type of glass used, the quality of its fabrication and its environmental conditions. Humidity, both inside and outside of a building, and weathering from sun, wind, rain, frost and snow play a large role in its longevity. Wind is capable of distorting and breaking glass panels, and so too are birds, stones and fire. Pollutants including dust and carbon from candles, stoves and enclosed fires also diminish the durability of stained glass and leadlight works, leading to holes that eventually join. While I see these material qualities in my previous bodies of work, Lectus does mark a significant departure in my practice. My use of a more intuitive and gestural line in Lectus, compared to that of say the body of work Hard forms, soft lives is a reflection of the impact this research project has had on my own living within designations of absence, misrecognition and obscurity. By engaging with the politics of abstraction I have found a spaciousness that can coexist with the presence of language and gestural forms, and figurative depictions of bodies, however vague they appear.

Spence Messih, RE-RE-RE- and Stars above/concrete below, 2018, steel, text, dimensions variable, installation view, Primavera 2018: Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Photo: Jacquie Manning. Courtesy of the artist 

Spence Messih, RE-RE-RE- and Stars above/concrete below, 2018, steel, text, dimensions variable, installation view, Primavera 2018: Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Photo: Jacquie Manning. Courtesy of the artist 

“Playing with the meanings of pastoral, as both something to tend to, to own and also in the sense of providing spiritual guidance, I wanted the triptych to evoke a sense of movement, landscape and precarity through the lyricism of the line. ”

MS: What guides the composition process in your stained glass pieces?

SM: The forms depicted in Lectus move in and out of the frame, offering moments of potential recognisability through lead or the texture of glass – a foot, a vessel or smoke, the texture of glass evoking tendons or the ‘hair shirt’ that Vincent mentions in ‘sonnet V’, or the impressions of a snake slithering over sand. 

The work Cinder explores ideas of framing and containment. The form on the left of the image appears weary, perhaps gazing out of a window to the right of the frame as a cloud of smoke rises up from the lower areas of the image. The title of this work is in reference to partly burnt wood that emits no flame but still has potential to reignite. A brief outline of an urn or vase is made visible in the slightly lipped curve of glass and lead.

The triptych Idyll I–III presents a series of undulating horizontal lines cutting through and out of each of the frames. The intersecting lines are evocative of a landscape or pastoral scene, contours of a map or the sinews that Vincent writes about in ‘sonnet III’. In thinking about ideas of borders and property, I have aimed to illustrate some sense of chaos and order, where the demarcation of space and the subjects within are connected yet vulnerable. With ambiguous forms of draped fabric, chrysalises or large conch shells appearing to hang off the lead, the works speak of movement and connection. The title, Idyll, refers to an extremely peaceful situation, but one that is fleeting and short lived. Playing with the meanings of pastoral, as both something to tend to, to own and also in the sense of providing spiritual guidance, I wanted the triptych to evoke a sense of movement, landscape and precarity through the lyricism of the line. The forms depicted appear disinterested in a prescriptive narrative, in being legible or in being contained in the centre of the frame. Their ambiguous, or perhaps particular shapes stake their claims next to each other. Lead is used in the works as both a boundary and limit, as a support mechanism for the individual pieces of glass to be held together and as a form of a break that allows separate shapes to rejoin and create new relations.

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