watching night fall like closing the first set of eyelids
2025
‘watching night fall like closing the first set of eyelids’
grass lawn.
‘Stomach and heart (918g, 326g)’
two aluminium plates 69.7cm x 40.6cm x 0.2cm, 43.2cm x 23 x 0.2cm,
colour photographs, two bronze arrowhead replicas, wood.
‘colour photographs of ‘Zhur’ a 57,000 year-old wolf cub found frozen in Yukon permafrost’
bronze arrowhead replica, flint arrowhead, wood, paper, glass, torch.
‘heart of brass (326g)’
brass plate 24cm x 13.4cm x 0.2cm, brass brackets.
Installed in The Writers Room, Holy Trinity Church, Islington, London, UK.
an exhibition of words and works by Lily Petch curated by Lu Rose Cunningham
‘watching night fall like closing the first set of eyelids’ includes a melding of material symbolism, archaeology and poetry, embedded in The Writer’s Room, Holy Trinity Church. Specific materials included in the installation build on a longer research project concerning the fragile yet overwhelming resilience of historical burial markers and substances which allow the capacity for these materials to survive erasure. Positioning historical artefact in relation and extension to contemporary preservation - thinking on the digital image and widely used materials to conserve memory, offering thought to histories of hierarchy over substances used to preserve personal essence.
(Aluminium is the most common metal found in the Earth's crust.)
The installation encounters three metal plates, two made of aluminium and one of brass. Two plates hold the average weight of a human heart and the other, averages the weight of a human stomach - these plates lay as contemporary ‘votive’ figures. The plates center a poetic rumination on the definitions and expectations of material roles with a nod to medieval monumental brasses.
Playful yet sombre, ‘watching night fall like closing the first set of eyelids’ considers the safety of subterranean space and reflection on the desire to slow or still time. The show includes both an installation and a reading around Lily Petch’s book ‘The written unit, signs, gravemarkers and the left behind object’, extracted from her undergraduate degree show installation at The Slade School of Fine Art in May 2024 and an extract from her recent project ‘something like fire’.
‘boiled low and slow in hours, a lifetime permanent, subterranean. to/too still by night, when night is always, steeped in the arms of a holder. in/inn between fragments of layers of weeping upward, met by the soles of a million feet. persistent as a fever, hemmed over the brow reflecting onto my knees, pushing upward and out in the form of silver hair.’
