You want to look (Secret Cherry, April 2024)

Tiles in Lewisham is currently garlanded with work by Benita Laylim and Viola Nazario – Secret Cherry closes this weekend.

On an afternoon a bit less than a month ago, Benita and I were sitting on the rocks, golden hour round us, the sea churning through it. She told me that the clay has to be ‘bone dry’ (her works in the show are ceramic, Viola’s are oil paintings on copper sheet). Otherwise, she said, ‘the water tries to get out too fast’ and the ceramics destroy themselves, small, shattering explosions.

So you put your pieces in the kiln, Benita said, much later than you want to, and you wait. You want to look, she said, but you can’t.

Ball and hook, Benita Laylim

She talked to me about the ways ceramics is more scientific than intuitive, the weirdness of having to lay out a military schedule when you are not someone who is on-time. Clay, she said, is ‘very unforgiving’ – a hard medium for hunting perfection.

At the opening, people wandered in and out, gentle and talkative – out onto the street to drink beer and smoke, then inside, pulled inevitably back to one piece or another, returning to gaze again at their own personal icon. I looked at a tile glazed with a deep, bright cobalt blue (late evening, early morning – some time out of time), broken by the white beam of a head-torch. I keep thinking about the wild, personal colours of Ball and hook, the abrupt intimacy and freedom of its metal and rope interruptions, a piece that seems impossible. ‘This one,’ a guy next to me said, motionless in front of another rectangle, of sinuous green and milk. We chatted, trying to work out if we might be related. Curls of clay licked up at us, leaves, ribbons, trails of wind. ‘This is it,’ he said. He bought it for his mother.

There is something mesmerising in the oil paintings, Viola’s steady gaze rendered in warm desert washes onto the copper, something else metallic and airy in the light planes – a sense of human time and work.

And there is a small zine with photos from old cherry-picking seasons, scraps of Viola and Benita’s diaries with memories and dreams noted down. Lucia Moon’s catalogue essay folds in both – or maybe the processes, the remembering, and the dreaming. Then, she writes: “In the morning, light pours into the orchard.”

Benita Laylim and Viola Nazario, 4 April 2024

Gabrielle Chantiri wrote a great review of the show on Memo which is here.