Ekphrastic Swan Lake - Manchester Art Gallery

Ekphrasis workshop (02/03): Swan Lake, Artists Anonymous (2007) - Manchester art gallery

“A print on paper” reads the white description box next to the piece of art hung, about chest height if you’re about 5ft 5 and standing in front of it, and presented in an equally unassuming white frame. The text box more so than the frame seems an oddly muted sort of way to describe the image of a naked woman who looks to be drowning herself in a bathtub. She is cut vertically against a darker, blurred image of what at first, second, and several more subsequent glances appears to be some sort of art studio in a cabin somewhere. The space is filled with smudges of clutter and hard-to-make-out shapes. At the back of the cabin is a large glass wall. Or, I suppose, you might call it a window.

Something that could possibly be a table, or maybe an empty, unfinished fish tank, owing to the suggestions of a turtle and a shrimp suspended in the left forefront of the dark picture, dominates most of the space. Next to it, difficult to make out at first, is the dark shadow of a figure whose identity has been erased by the shapes of leaves. It doesn’t look like the leaves have seeped onto her from the foliage in the background as such, but instead like someone is shining a light on the entire forest and she has managed somehow to hide herself within the darkness. Only by scrutinising the image for an almost painful amount of time can you just about make out what could be a hood, pulled up to conceal the figure’s face as they attempt to climb something. What it is they’re trying to scale is impossible to tell, despite the suggestion of a raised knee and a foot, wedged, in what could be a makeshift ladder, but which also sort of looks like a pane of glass set in a precariously leant metal panel. 

The foliage in question is that of a jungle scene visible through the maybe cabin’s maybe back window. The green of the leaves reminds me of Henri Rousseau’s Tiger in a Tropical Storm, which has always looked to me like it was painted by someone who had never before in fact ever seen a real tiger in real life. It is only after your eyes have somewhat adjusted to the dark smudges between the wild flowers of the jungle in Swan Lake that you might shift your gaze down and slightly to the right, in order to see the four swans to which I suppose the print owes its namesake, perched upon what I guess must be a lake, but which appears to me more like a pond. Only after you’ve taken all of this in, and you’re still trying to work out how the pale blue shades of water blend into the darker, bluer, greyer shapes in the front, do you remember the naked woman drowning in the bathtub to the left of all of this. And yet there are plants and flowers coiling into the metal work of the tap, and up the solid white sides of the tub, as the outside seeps into the inside, and merges into a moment of the self. 

Her skin is various shades of pink and purple, like she’s covered in one single bruise which spreads out across her whole body, smothering her skin. The swirls in the surface of the water, and those depicted in harsh white lacerations across her body as well as the wet space around it, make this little lake in a bathroom look recently disturbed. Yet, the mottled colours she bears make her look like she’s been there beneath the bath water for a while, and you realise by now you’ve been standing in front of this print for at least ten minutes. 

Still, it is only after you’ve examined the image further, this time on the small screen of your mobile phone on the bus on the way home, and again when you study the woman whom you know nothing about again the next day, feeling the beginnings of an incessant fascination with this image start to emerge, that you realise there are people in the swirls and shadows of her hair. Crowds of men and women, some sat with their arms resting on their knees and others more difficult to make out, trapped in the ring of locks that surrounds the pained face of the woman beneath the surface. Just behind these strangers lies the metal hose of the shower head, almost as if she’d contemplated strangling herself with it, before deciding it wasn’t necessary after all.