In the ticking room

Curated by Margarita Cappock

Opening night: 16th of January 2025, 6-8pm 

Eileen Leonard Sealy's work ruminates on the human relationship to objects, striving to challenge the accepted notions that the realms of the animate and inanimate are impenetrable to each other. Exploring the layered relationships between humans, objects, and places, at its core is a fascination with how environments, whether personal and well lived in or abandoned and disused, can carry traces of human presence.

Key paintings in In the ticking room depict interiors and items that are personal to the artist, as well as imagined scenarios from the lives and homes of others, breeding a disjointed narrative, rendering the artist as an unreliable narrator on both the actual or emotional truths that construct our memories. The exhibition explores the role that objects may have in containing memory, the unseen forces that animate life and whether humanhood can be extended beyond the person.

The work can be characterised by the extensive use of the human figure, while items such as fireplaces, chimneys, bellows, bagpipes, ornaments, puppets and a rocking horse play a supporting role. Questioning which are more reliable indicators of time spent, accrued objects or ambiguous recollections, the artist looks at ideas of form, void and existence. Recurring motifs in the work are fireplaces, chimney stacks and bricks, as the artist finds that the perceived boundaries between inert and latent forms becomes muddied. Fireplaces serve as a conduit between the internal and the external, and on the mantelpieces of which, are traditionally where prized possessions such as ashes and trophies are displayed. While bricks are often used as an example of the most inert object possible, as in ‘as thick as a brick’, when they are assembled in their intended use they can become the keystones in housing personal attachment and meaning. 

With what certainty do we have the sole rights to emotion and memory and what else aside from humans may have a degree of sentience? If we suspend the disbelief that we are the only observing party in a room full of objects, how might you move around that room?

The title of the exhibition In the ticking room derives from a line in the Scottish poet W.S. Graham’s (1918-1986) poem I Leave This at Your Ear