In Onya McCausland’s recent exhibition in the Cathedral at Gloucester, her works – dual works one should say, as their expression was only completed by the implications of their pairing – resonated with a presence that, against all the odds, not only held their place in that most marvellous of Cathedrals, but added to its richness. It wasn’t a case of ‘added value’ – showing in the context of a great work of architecture can work both ways – but rather that the language of stone and timber and carving found an echo in her coloured earth surfaces; and the intervals, repetitions, differences and similarities of her mark – making reflected not only from one piece to another, within the work itself, but also to the repetition of pillars, flagstones, carved patterns and lacy ceiling structures of the cathedral.
The context for this new piece, carved into, or perhaps one could say on to – the wall of ‘70a Brick Lane’, could hardly be more different. By no stretch of the imagination could one use the word ‘greatest’ to describe Brick Lane in London’s East End. But here the density of her piece stands in strange contrast to her lightness of touch. The softness and richness of the Lamp Black is soot collected straight from the remaining chimneys of the area. It is now added to her repetoire of English Red Earth and Cathedral dust, to name just two of the earth colours she uses. It roots the piece in place in both senses of the word: its locality, and its fixedness. (Site specific seems too banal a word to use here).

Transcribed onto a flat surface, the soot is then used to imply opposites. The first surface is laid on densely and deeply, rubbed on with her hands. Then its partner is built from the soot on the rubber that she uses to remove some of the material from the first to the second. The duality of the piece reflects from one of its surfaces to the other. The density of the one, the transparency of its partner. There is a shift from the deep impermeability of the one, towards dissolution and nothingness in the other. But that shift describes the paradox of the pairing of opposites: the two halves become more than the sum of their parts: they become a powerful metaphor, seen and felt in the fundamental duality of so much in nature and our own experiences. Night and day, good and evil, revealation and concealment. And here these complex opposites, with their ambiguities and paradoxes seemingly simplified and clarified, are expressed so clearly and directly in black and white, on to the wall of a small room in Brick Lane.

TESS JARAY 2008