Seafoam, shells & inhabited stone, Eileen Agar - Angel of Anarchy, Leeds Art Gallery by Eloise Bennett
Eileen Agar, Precious Stones, 1936. Courtesy of Leeds Museums and Galleries © The estate of Eileen Agar
being rolled under by waves – being folded under – caught by a folded corner,
the paper stuck down permanently to reveal ‘AGAR’ in black ink
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Geologic layers, seafoam and spiral shells all feature in the work of artist Eileen Agar (1899-1991). They appear as shape or shadow, form, texture and feeling throughout her visual-sensorial language: as collaged elements, painted glyphs, and as part of assemblages and costumes. Works by Agar across these mediums are currently on view at Leeds Art Gallery in an exhibition that brings together paintings, collage, sculpture, photography and archival material. Throughout her interdisciplinary career Agar experimented with Surrealist and Cubist techniques, although she eschewed the constraints of both, tracing a unique path towards lyrical and spiritual forms of abstraction.[1] Rocky terrains and precious oceanic objects do not remain still and unmoving here: they are inhabited stone.[2] Agar captures their living qualities – movement, defiant solidity, soft yielding – which can be found in the hardest edges, impenetrable granite surfaces, or bleached white bone. Through casting a net, cutting, pasting and painting Agar points to the animacy, to the aliveness of these materials; in her hands stone dances, whispers and trembles.[3]
Running throughout her artistic experimentation, Agar’s beachcombing is ever-present as an activity of assembling, seeking, finding and collecting. These actions are conjured and evoked through her archived objects: the pace of walking, crouching to inspect a potential pebble or shell, the shape and texture, the weight in the pocket. These objects have a changing appearance – once picked up and brought home they settle down beside treasures from other walks. Agar herself glued some of these found objects together, added painted details, or pasted them over drawings and paintings. On the surface of a whorled mollusc shell, Agar added strokes of orange, pink and yellow. In washing the shell with bright paint, she immortalised the iridescent shine, the glint of light that draws the eye and attracts the net. Shell-like shapes are conjured as cut and pasted photographs, painted swirled conch shells, abstract forms that draw on the structure of coral, and as fragments incorporated into three-dimensional collages in composite objects. Among the three-dimensional objects on view in Leeds, a piece of peach coral is affixed to a plastic tripod. Resting on round red spheres, the abstract lines of the tripod contrast with the fleshy pleats and paper-thin concertina of the coral. The shells, rocks, corals, and bones that Agar sought out became a collection of companions formed of rock and shell.
Eileen Agar, Painted shell, date unknown. Acrylic paint on shell. Tate Archive TGA 9222/3/2/13 © The estate of Eileen Agar. All Rights Reserved 2022 / Bridgeman Images
Eileen Agar, Sculpture consisting of a piece of coral glued to a plastic tripod, date unknown. Tate Archive TGA 9222/3/2/10 © The estate of Eileen Agar. All Rights Reserved 2022 / Bridgeman Images
Resonating with Agar’s depictions, in her poem Sea Violet, H.D. (1886-1961) describes the fragility of a flower among shells:
the sea-violet
fragile as agate,
lies fronting all the wind
among the torn shells
on the sand-bank.[4]
This text was published in the collection Sea Garden, in 1916, alongside other poems describing salt-encrusted flowers in a harsh coastal setting. H.D. was a writer and poet associated with Imagism in the early twentieth century; the Imagists were a group of writers and poets who favoured clarity of images, sharp and direct language. H.D. and Agar were near contemporaries and had friends in common through the crossings of art and writing. H.D.’s poems are frequently described as sparse and hard-edged which might not, at first, seem to resonate with the lyrical colour, excess and textures of Agar’s practice. H.D.’s collection of poems animates a coastal landscape, drawn partially from her memories of ‘her mother’s garden, the fields and woods of Upper Darby, and the shorelines of Maine, New Jersey, and Rhode Island’.[5] Simultaneously, these compositions evoke a Greek, or specifically Sapphic, world haunted by gods; the landscape is by turns acrid, erotic, yielding and tender. In her brief lines, each petal and twig is imbued with tangible emotional tremors. Throughout Agar’s collages, the torn shells and hard outer shapes that H.D. invokes through writing – spiral, cone, doubled oval – are centred on softness. Each conceals a pink flesh-toned inner: not only a cherishing, but a prising open.
In Agar’s depictions the shell acts as a hearing trumpet: an object we might press close to the ear, trying to catch the sound reverberating within. Her visual language invokes these sea-sounds: the reflective inner of silver bounces back an echoed nothingness – a rush that enfolds the listener. Agar invites us to press close against the veil of landscape, into the curve of the nautilus.
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Agar’s abstract paintings mimic contour lines, map uneven terrain, or allude to geological diagrams, of layers of rock and sediment compressed. From this tangle there are shapes that emerge and re-emerge from formlessness. The collage process appears too as a kind of stratigraphic compression – the sharp edge of scissors – the formation of sediment – pasting and gluing in fragments and layers. Agar’s images visibly surface this process of folding and unfolding: time passes, the layers are compressed and folded inwards. Among the threaded lines, a curved teardrop shape appears: a drop of dew, condensation, saline water.
Among Agar’s assemblage works is a small pebble, painted with a green tinged seafoam, at the centre is a bright blue six-pointed star. Tiny flecks of yellow and blue mark its surface. Each brushstroke forms a semicircle, rigid bristles carving each line. In her poem Sea Lily H.D. speaks of the plant torn by the wind, ‘dashed’ and shaken, then ‘lifted up’, covered ‘with froth’.[6] This meeting of air and water appears both destructive and sacred. In H.D.’s writing, as in Agar’s compositions and assemblages, strings of air criss-cross the water. This foam clouds any reflections on the mirrored surface. Within Agar’s practice, droplets and salted water submerge, soak and wash objects and creatures. A silver silhouette fades into the darkened pool. Quivering foam rests in the curve of a shell.
Eileen Agar, Stone painted green with blue star painted on it, 28 June 1986. Tate Archive TGA 9222/3/2/3. © The estate of Eileen Agar. All Rights Reserved 2022 / Bridgeman Images
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Agar’s net is cast over a waste of water and dragged through tidal pools.[7] When writing on shells, Gaston Bachelard noted that in the ‘very tissue of its matter’ the shell is ‘alive’.[8] The shape and function of shells, for Bachelard, meant an inherent ‘capacity for renewal’, ‘resurrection or reawakening of being’; he took this to signify a ‘coalescence of reveries’ and ‘daydreams’.[9] Agar’s paintings and sculptures transport us to a world of dreams, of reverie, in which the silhouetted profile – of a lover, a goddess, our own reflection – darts from view at the slightest touch, quivering in the shaded corner of the tidal pool. Her submerged world responds to the action of netting: anemones bristle and sea creatures languish in the tide –
Are you alive?
I touch you.
You quiver like a sea-fish.
I cover you with my net
What are you—banded one?[10]
In casting her net – as H.D. describes in The Pool – water and rock are laced over, captured and tied down. Agar’s gesture, her hands cutting and pasting, perform these actions of catch and capture. In the collage Precious Stones, 1936, Agar uses paper printed with individually numbered jewels, carved stones and cameos to form the silhouette of a head and shoulders. A shadow falls behind the cut-out profile, before pasted layers of red and blue. Agar’s name is here under the lifted corner. Mirroring Precious Stones, the composition of Collage Head, 1937, uses paper printed with sea creatures – several species of cephalopod are featured, one emerging from a shell. Agar’s name isn’t unfolded from the corner, but crouches among the seaweed. This silhouette is pasted on to a cream and soft pink border, with a photographic image of a sculpture directly behind. The visible carved curving lines mimic both hair and trembling seaweed.
Netting is a retrieval: to bring something from this dream world to the surface. To seek, to capture, to collect and archive. It is a means of saying: here are solid and tangible objects, formations and beings. Here is how I might draw myself back. Here is the edge I can clutch at, that I can pull myself up with. To net over is to retrieve from formlessness.[11] The reflection, the shimmering surface, the unknown banded one, the amorphous shape, the shadow is drawn out.
Eileen Agar, Collage Head, 1937. The Murray Family Collection, UK & USA © The Estate of Eileen Agar / Bridgeman Images
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Shells are embedded in – and deeply connected to – Agar’s worlds of vegetation, skies, clouds, flowers, figures, and sacred objects. They are connected through texture, colour, movement and juxtaposition. As in H.D.’s poems, there is a visual link between upturned white shell and fallen flower petal:
sea-iris, brittle flower,
one petal like a shell
is broken,
and you print a shadow
like a thin twig.[12]
An upturned scallop shell as a white petal – its inner curve opened out. Agar’s shells are protective talismans, signifiers of the sacred, a covering and protective layer for the creature within. In the exhibition, from photography to assemblage, I trace a line from iridescent outer shell to sheer fabric covering the body, the ecstasy of nothing between, the thinned veil, and a communion or connection across a membrane. H.D.’s Sea Iris has both these brittle, hard-edged, protective qualities, and the fragility and softness of a petal.
H.D. describes how the ‘shadow’ of the sea iris is printed, linking to Agar’s imprints in frottage, rubbings in graphite and crayon taken from uneven surfaces. In a black and white photograph taken in the 1930s, Agar documents starry daisies alongside pebbles, foliage and shells. The white petals cast a dark shadow, their shapes recalling that of a sea anemone. As the petal is broken, the brittle shell is shattered, so follows the total disintegration of the self, a rolling of waves and a shouldering under, a total dissolution.[13] This dissolution need not be a state of hopelessness, but one of meshing with the wider worlds Agar builds – the fluidity of water, the oceanic feeling.
Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy is on view at Leeds Art Gallery until 7 May 2022. The exhibition is the largest presentation of Agar’s work to date, featuring paintings, collages, photographs and archive material, much of which has been rarely exhibited. The exhibition was developed in partnership with the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London and the Mjellby Konstmuseum, Halmstad, Sweden.
[1] Laura Smith, “Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy,” in Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy, ed. Laura Smith and Grace Storey (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2021), 9, 19.
[2] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 1994) 115.
[3] Ithell Colquhoun, The Living Stones: Cornwall (London: Peter Owen, 2017) 64. Colquhoun described the ‘geologic substratum’ and standing stones of Cornwall: ‘Stones that whisper, stones that dance, that play on pipe or fiddle, that tremble at cockcrow, that eat and drink, stones that march as an army – these unhewn slabs of granite hold the secret of the country’s inner life.’
[4] H.D. “Sea Violet,” from “Sea Garden (1916),” in Collected Poems 1912–1942 (New York: New Directions, 1986), 25.
[5] “H. D. 1886–1961,” Poetry Foundation, accessed 31 March 2022, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/h-d
[6] H.D. “Sea Lily,” from “Sea Garden (1916),” 14.
[7] Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary (London: Persephone Books, 2012), 169. In a diary entry for 7 February 1931, upon completing her novel The Waves, Woolf described netting a fin in a waste of water that had appeared to her ‘over the marshes out of my window’.
[8] Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 115.
[9] Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 117.
[10] H.D. “The Pool,” from “The God (1913–1917),” in Collected Poems 1912–1942 (New York: New Directions, 1986), 56. “The Pool” was published separately to Sea Garden, in the anthology Some Imagist Poets, 1915, edited anonymously by Amy Lowell.
[11] Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 2000), 152.
[12] H.D. “Sea Iris,” from “Sea Garden (1916),” 36-7.
[13] Woolf, The Waves, 116.