Artists: Sophie Birch - Rachel Youn

Figures of Speech provides a framework for exploring how ‘language’, whether through vibration or pigment, can reveal more than it signals.

Birch’s paintings examine the unseen forces that shape aural and tactile perception. One of her main investigations is around sound, where elements like the ear’s cochlea (which processes vibrations) and the lateral line (an animal hearing sensor) inspire her works. Her layered paintings are made through tactile marks, using time as a medium for transformation.

While Birch’s brushstrokes simulate finger-painted surfaces, Rachel Youn’s sculptures are made from machines built to touch. Youn sources them second-hand, drawn to their functional failure: designed to replicate human fingers, they were never good enough. Youn’s kinetic sculptures use artificial orchids and real dried flower stems, both existing in a state of controlled perfection, untouched by decay in an illusion of desirable beauty. Yet, they are also subjected to relentless motion, enduring the mechanical torment their works impose.

Both artists share an engagement in radical decontextualisation of their points of departure: one dismantles didactic anatomical imagery, the other repurposes massage machines and exercise platforms. In both cases, the reference points become unrecognisable in the final works. For Birch, the anatomical inspiration is transformed into an ambiguous landscape with a great evocative capacity. In the case of Youn, the functionality of their machines is transformed by mixing them with natural or natural-like and human elements to create kinetic sculptures. The results of both creative processes turn the decontextualisation they share into almost opposite cognitive challenges. In Birch’s case, the sensuality of the images could stimulate imaginations of atmospheric phenomena and in Youn’s, the strangeness of the combined elements in loops strains our imagination with erotic resonances and absurd humour. The spectators therefore access the experience of harmony (Birch) and dissonance (Youn) from these trajectories of decontextualisation.

– Text by Vanessa Murrell