Bang, splat. You don’t just walk into Emma Cousin’s new exhibition, you slam – Wile E Coyote-style – into it, colliding into a fake tunnel painted on a wall. It’s a prank, a slapstick trap for you to fall into.
That opening trompe l’oeil leads to a world full of tunnels and tubes. In shimmeringly toxic-coloured and fleshy paintings, the English artist depicts figures with eyes that have become tunnels laid with train tracks, mouths that have become doorways, orifices are now portals, guts and viscera are now private microworlds accessed through secret gory passages.
In an accompanying essay, Cousin writes about how childbirth made her see the body as a series of tunnels; these interconnected tubes which move goo and poo and plasma and life around the body. It’s a thought which has infected her work. She’s got tunnel vision, she sees tubes and alleys everywhere, in noses and ear holes, in hands formed into curves. It’s singular, manic, almost narcissistic in its self-reflection, and beautiful too.
It’s a good idea to be infected with, because there are so many symbolic, metaphorical layers to the idea of tunnelling. It can be about finding a way, an escape route through impossibly tricky terrain (figurative and literal), it can be about digging in, digging deep, it can be about obsessing, about having tunnel vision. And more than anything, it’s about looking inwards and examining yourself, minutely, microscopically. All these ideas are coursing through Cousin’s tunnels.
This is bodily, weird, obsessive painting, a collision of Looney Tunes and Maria Lassnig that’ll make you feel more feelings about the Tube network than you ever thought possible.