1.27m x 1.02m, Acrylic on canvas.
Helen Brooks managed to paint this series without succumbing to the obvious temptation of going to B and Q and buying some eggshell paint, though some omelettes were inevitably harmed during the making of these paintings. The works were originally commissioned by Robert Kilroy Silk, to go in his converted hide, which he sheds each August and uses as a sort of playroom. Silk however, lost interest in the Eggs project about the same time as he fell in love with the embroidered shoe from the opening freeze-frame sequence of Thames Television’s The Sweeney (the one pressing on the accelerator pedal). Silk’s spurning of Eggs is of course our gain.
The first and most striking quality of this supernova of broken ova is what T.Pot refers to pithily as ‘an exalting “egg!-get salt”- gestalt egg-assault’. Clearly, as Pot notes, these four works together form a static but nonetheless dancing quadrille of visual and visceral poetry. For example, each individual painting says ‘H’ in wire, but in a way that not only says something else entirely, but also rhymes with all the other Hs: the egg on each says in relation to the other ‘nascent and adjacent’; the shell punctured by the barb (juxtaposed with the vertical flash of orange), clearly and elegantly states ‘fiery streak- “ooh, that looks like a beak!”.
Attempting to order the themes in this series would be to try to count eggs while the chickens hatched. For that which is now the text could in a moment become the subtext, and vice-versa. In fact, by the time you have read that last sentence, the process might well have reversed. There is nonetheless a steely constant thread that winds through the tension of these paintings like the knotty stomach of an unexpectedly jilted lover with a terrible hangover. What does not sit, but rather hangs on the eclectic fence, is the metaphorical precariousness of our birthright, confined by the barbed wire of such insidious institutions as Barbie-d why-are (?) consumerism. There is little or no hope of getting away on a big motorbike in a Steve McQueen stylee.
So all at once, the viewer is confronted both by their individuation: the -if you will- ‘coming out of one’s shell’, and the epiphany of the periphery. Eggs turns all that is external eternal, against which the viewer is shockingly ephemeral. What we have is nothing less than something, and a lot more than just nothing. It is this tension in Eggs, wound up in the troubling coil in the centre of each painting, which dovetails it into its present setting. The busy-ness of business, i.e. the power salad dressing of doing lunch, and the industrial espionage of eggy-toast soldiers on a mission behind enemy lines. Eggs asks its viewers if they can make it across the wire. After digesting , you may not even understand the question any more. Such is the force of putting all of these Eggs in the one basket case.
In ‘Did Arty Farty Have a Party: if So, Was Everybody Really There?’ In Aesthetics and Kids’ Daft Rhymes Quarterly: Forthcoming, spring 2038.