From erupting volcanoes to Elon Musk’s swaddling satellites: the cosmic, chaotic art of Caragh Thuring
Nuclear submarines, gods in women’s bedrooms, a threadbare office carpet inside the World Trade Center … Thuring talks about painting the world on the brink
Nuclear submarines, gods in women’s bedrooms, a threadbare office carpet inside the World Trade Center … Thuring talks about painting the world on the brink of chaos – and letting you join the dots ‘We are living through a moment of hellish, mindless destruction,” Caragh Thuring tells me, shortly after offering me a cup of tea and a chocolate chip biscuit.
We are sitting in the artist’s east London studio, surrounded by paintings, magazine cuttings and cryptic handwritten notes (“AWARENESS, TESTING”). There are metal racks littered with crumpled tubes of paint and bookshelves lined with artists’ monographs. “Making paintings at this moment is, on the one hand, total folly,” she admits. “On the other hand, it is utterly rebellious.” Before us is a painting, around seven feet high and five wide, in which the shadowy silhouettes of US military airplanes are flanked by densely packed clusters of bombs.
The tapering body of one plane transfigures into the effigy of a knight laid out on a table tomb, one hand clasped to the hilt of a sword, jointed greaves poking out from beneath the wing of a B-52. The confusion of medieval and contemporary imagery, religious art and martial technology, eternal peace and endless war, is bewildering.
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