UNCANNY GOODBYES

Laura Henderson-Child, Tank, January 1, 2020
There’s something not quite right about one tree on the Compton Verney estate. It stands a distance away from the others, and there’s an eerie sharpness to its shape. Its branches form a hand that shoots from the arm of its bare trunk, reminiscent of the imagery of gothic novels that persistently confuse the definitions of human and nature. Up close, it isn’t a real tree at all, but a sculpture cast in aluminium and holding pieces of broken mirror as it stretches up to the sky, these shards of glass recalling scenes of noisy mishap and domestic urgency but sitting peacefully in the branches. Even the lawn on which the artist Ariel Schlesinger constructed the piece is not as it seems: the installation process was forcibly delayed by the discovery of medieval pottery within the depths of the soil.
 
Ways to Say Goodbye draws its intrigue from the tension between the known and the strange that defines the uncanny. The work becomes more visually alienating the nearer one edges toward it. Schlesinger’s tree will be at Compton Verney for a full year, and so the shifting states of undress of the trees nearby will at points almost obscure its outsider status, and at others lay it bare.
 
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