Crawford Art Gallery
8 December 2023 – 5 March 2024
Looped in Crawford Art Gallery’s projection space, as part of an ongoing screening series entitled ‘The Power of Us’, Venus Patel’s Eggshells is a short film made in response to a transphobic assault in which she was pelted with eggs. The egg is already an object loaded with symbolism. As the artist points out, its psychological and symbolic meanings include the power of reincarnation, birth, nature, and hope, as well as the ability to belittle or humiliate.
As part of her project exploring her experience as a transfemme of colour, navigating a largely heteronormative world, Patel seizes on these multiple facets of the egg to process this traumatic incident instead of simply internalising it. The resulting work, while never losing sight of the underlying seriousness of the assault and its broader implications, is nothing if not joyously defiant. Patel creates a bracingly rough-hewn musical that embraces the colourfully gritty aesthetic of underground cinema and its liberating tradition of seizing, personalising and often subverting archetypes and narrative conventions. Through juxtaposing a series of outlandishly camp, flamboyantly costumed figures, performing against the oppressively grim, mainly public spaces that they inhabit, she uses humour and absurdity to call out the othering pressure of a still bleakly conformist society.
Eggshells plays out in 12 sections, or ‘acts’, each corresponding to a different character played by Patel. Each of these figures reference Carl Jung’s archetypes and perform with an egg. They are all, according to Patel, “based around my own personal understanding of myself in how I react and perceive the world around me.” As the acts unfold, they trace an emotional trajectory that moves from internalised hurt through anger, liberation, connection, destruction, nothingness, and rebirth. The sections are all captioned with a title card bearing the name of the character portrayed in them, names which are all unambiguously masculine in contrast with the archetypally feminine characters depicted. These include a princess, a dancer, a sex worker, a seductress, a housewife, a bride, a vampire, and a chicken.
The first character, Claude, is an eighteenth-century aristocrat, dreamily drifting around a park. Claude is at once a model of fairy tale innocence and perhaps also a figure symbolising a target for revolution, a condition in need of overthrow. The dreamer might need awakening. The first post-assault reaction is to rise above the experience and escape it. Tom, a model of moustached positivity, grows the egg like a plant that transports her, Jack and the Beanstalk-style, to the clouds. But she crashes back to earth as a 1920s-style street performer, who dances in a busy Grafton Street to general indifference and breaks the egg over her head. From this expression of frustrated invisibility emerges a sex worker who dances in an empty residential street and breaks the egg in a condom. The next character is similar but instead of exuding cool professionalism, she brims over with rage and flings her egg at the iconic gates of the Guinness Brewery. These imposing and austere black barriers are apt targets for her frustration, as they represent both Ireland and different modes of exclusion.
As a gorgeously flamboyant seductress, she is presented with an egg as an offering under The Spire on O’Connell Street; but in the next sequence, her suitor has become a neglectful husband whom she murders. Having liberated herself from this relationship, she transcends to a pastoral dancing nymph and then a bride, who regretfully abandons her betrothed at the church door, leaving him holding her egg. She is then prey to dark forces that turn her into a vampire who reclaims the egg in the graveyard. Sinking into darkness and chaos, she ultimately re-emerges as a dancing chicken, the egg now a symbol of (re)birth.
As well as Patel’s always engaging performances, the power of Eggshells largely stems from its eloquent, formal roughness. At a time when capturing pristine HD images has become perhaps too easy, the lo-fi visual textures of Eggshells are a lovely reminder of just how poetic and subversive a DIY aesthetic can be in appropriating and othering established conventions and archetypes. When applied with the nuance and sophistication of Eggshells, it feels compellingly personal in a way that a slickly polished aesthetic could not achieve.
Maximilian Le Cain is a filmmaker and critic based in Cork City.
maximilianlecain.com
