Reviews: Vermont

Fran Bull: In Flanders Fields
Gallery at 259 Marble Street • West Rutland, VT • www.carvingstudio.org • Through March 2010

In Flanders Field the poppies blow / Between the crosses row on row... The lines of the poem, hypnotic in their rhythm and rhyme, reverberate as the leitmotif in the work of multimedia artist Fran Bull. Poems often inspire Bull’s work but rarely so profoundly as in the exhibit In Flanders Field, which is a meditation not only on death and war, but life itself.

Gossamer scrolls, Prayers, are delicately printed with mysterious images of intertwined bones drawn from the skeletons of Neolithic lovers. These provide a counterpoint to the dense nine-part black-and-white etching, The Fallen Ones, which is the focal point of the exhibit. Bull has carved into the etching plate, tracing imagined soldiers’ faces, each lost in his own enigmatic death, each an interplay of light and dark, figure and ground, pain and peace. The artist continually ruminates on the complex nature of human beings, who are capable of both the most exquisite gestures of love and the harshest forms of life-negating acts.

Sculptural reliefs punctuate the planes of the walls. Each chalk-white face is mummified in its square pine box, into which viewers have tucked their own red rice paper notes. The layered transparencies appear as fluttering leaves shimmering within the silent rigid frames of the wooden boxes. Interspersed with the wall reliefs are large-scale etchings, in both bright and subdued tones, which play on the more hopeful themes of the larks and poppies of the original poem.

Bull’s sense of theater is in full sway in the installation, Lysistrata and her Band of Women, drawn from Aristophanes’ play about the Peloponnesian War, in which the women of Greece collectively denied their husbands sexual favors until they had negotiated peace. Like caryatids, they form a solemn procession throughout the exhibit, inviting us to join the chorus of protest, albeit in our own way. In Flanders Field is an epic and elegiac hymn composed of subtle yet powerful notes reminding us of the constant interplay between life and death, not only on the world stage, but in our own day-to-day lives.

—B. Amore