Celia Hempton at Phillida Reid
As an audience, we crave something more. Strangers telling us their secrets, or even their daily routine, is not only tired, but we don't know what to do with it. Similarly, as humans we are not equipped to handle the traumas of every individual on the planet, which can feel callous, but ultimately explains why we are at an impasse of action around world-altering situations and conditions (the COVID lockdowns were the last moment of collective action for some). This is where London-based artist Celia Hempton's paintings come in. I first encountered Hempton's work almost a decade ago, with her Chat Random body of work, which saw the artist depict her experiences on the website of the same name, which to the uninitiated is a version of Chat Roulette, where the user is randomly connected to another from around the world via webcam. The users are usually up to no good. Hempton's paintings of masturbating men were, amazingly, not overly crass; for starters, the viewer needed to squint a little to fully comprehend what was being depicted, but the way in which the private and public merged to create an artwork was something of a unique blueprint.
For her latest exhibition at Phillida Reid in London, the same curiosity persists, but this time we are plunged into a seemingly very specific moment in the artist's life. Three tropes are explored in these paintings, which exist at a range of scales: kidney transplants, sites of construction and destruction, and surveillance. Initially, there are some mental gymnastics involved to link the three elements, and it would be obnoxious to state otherwise. However, with the understanding that Hempton's young child recently underwent a kidney transplant, provided by the artist's partner, one can start assembling the pieces of the puzzle. All of a sudden, the easy wins of autobiographical work are subverted, and the exhibition becomes an exercise in nuance.
What we seem to be witnessing is the memorialisation of a particular moment in time. This cannot be shared verbatim, because we do not have the same stakes in the intimate details that would have produced heightened emotions and concerns for the artist. That is not to say that we cannot sympathise or empathise, but regardless, that is not what the artist is seeking in Transplant. Several of the smaller paintings, nine to be exact, are snapshots of the aforementioned kidney transplant that took place. It is not clear as to whether these are taken from the surgery whereby the artist's child and partner were patients, but thinking this thought aloud, I now consider this was unlikely the case. Instead of being alive with human bodies and activity, the paintings highlight the routine-ness of the operation, the everyday efficiency and aptitude. Perhaps my line of enquiry as to whether the paintings were made from Hempton observing a surgery she had an emotional stake in was telling; producing these images of professional nephrologists at work could have been a cathartic experience.
But back in the gallery, the viewer needs to make some sense of the various tropes at play. The narrative jumps between the interior and exterior world, concluding with the liberation of seeing that the exterior world is still turning after a personally traumatic event. With the construction and destruction of the built environment in cities, material birth, death and transformation are so normalised that we feel them to be natural. There is a profoundly ugly sensory overload of architectural demolition, including the emotional upheaval that comes with gentrification and rebuilding over the remains of communities considered unsightly or not capable of generating enough income for the proprietor. The chaos of it all is conveyed well in Hempton's works. This being said, there is a juvenile wonder presented in Demolishing a building in central London, 17th August 2024, a painting that is huge and manages to irk the viewer with the visual noise of with its jarring shapes and colours, jostling for attention. In witnessing the painting, we can almost hear the sounds of the demolition taking place. It is messy and destructive, yes, but in movement and change we cannot help but see life. Vital energies move around the built environment, regardless of what it represents, and this can be some solace when our internal worlds feel murky and helpless.
The fusion of Hempton's three chosen tropes gives us an incredibly nuanced insight into a particular period of the artist's life, without giving away crude details. When an individual has a platform, whether that is an artist holding a solo show at a renowned gallery or an influencer with thousands of followers, visiblity demands a sense of what would historically be deemed "over-sharing". Transplant is a welcome reprieve from this culture. Even the surveillance trope, where Hempton has reproduced stills from CCTV footage in geographies as disparate as Belgium, India, Indonesia, and the UK, there is not a sense of encroaching on the subject matter's privacy. In fact, there are times throughout the show where the viewer finds themselves begging for more narrative, more hand-holding. That is what we are used to with social media: no need for a complex narrative, there's no time, this has to be scroll-stopping short-form content. Hempton's Chat Random works found themselves with a degree of internet fame, and the same audience may find the links frustrating in these newer paintings, but affording oneself the luxury of taking time to read beyond the surface pays dividends at Phillida Reid, and nods towards a 'post-autobiographical' style that has potential to produce much-needed empathy towards one another.
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