2013 Residency at the Museum of the History of Science, Medecine and Technology; residency at Modern Art Oxford Project Space, followed by solo exhibition of 'Real/Non-Real' and open conversation with Emeritus Profecssor Martin Kemp also at MAO. Text by Eddie Chambers. Arts Council funded
Exhibitions at the Queen of Hungary Project Space and at Leeds University School of Science and Technology

Stephanie Douet: What Are We Looking At? by Eddie Chambers

To engage with the work of Stephanie Douet is to enter a particularly fascinating, intriguing and on occasion, decidedly challenging dialogue with the artist. Whilst her practice is remarkably wide-ranging, at its core it retains an attachment to questions of perception. She takes us out of a world of apparent visual certainties and obliges us to engage her work in ways that almost rely, for its existence, on uncertainty. Her latest body of work, Real/Non-Real epitomises her singular approach to her practice. Stephanie’s work sets the supposedly real against the supposedly unreal, or non-real, through a variety of strategies. Real/Non-Real continues Stephanie’s “series of visual experiments, mediating the real world through simple means such as lenses, mirrors, paint and lights to produce complex and mind-altering landscapes.”

I first worked with Stephanie, and encountered her work a decade or so ago, when she and several other artists based in the east of England undertook a series of installations and other interventions in the particularly charged and loaded (and at the same time, challenging) context of a former World War Two airfield in Seething, Norfolk. Stephanie’s contribution alarmed, confounded and intrigued its audiences. Her work, in this instance, consisted of a decidedly odd looking construction of mirrored three dimensional shapes, irregular in size, assembled in a way as to almost defy any sort of easy description. But as odd as the work may have been, Stephanie had in fact taken her cue from a strange, bizarre assembly of military radar-cum-radio receiving equipment – long since dysfunctional – that stood atop one of the airfield buildings. Adding a particular element of mystery, no one quite knew what the original structure was, and or how it had come to be shaped as it was. Thus, unsuspecting visitors to Air Field, in comprehending both Stephanie’s construction and the inspiration for her piece, were unsettled and in this state of being, were obliged to ask themselves what on earth it was that they we looking at. As much as her piece took its cue from a structure assembled more than half a century earlier, it also presented itself as being from, or pointing towards, some distant, future, otherworldly, space and time. It is this sense of otherworldliness, frequently rooted, curiously enough, in everyday objects, that gives so much of Stephanie’s work its aura or aesthetics of surrealism or provocative unreality.

Fascinatingly, and with remarkable thoughtfulness and creativity, Stephanie had placed the mirrored or reflective surface at the heart of the making of her Air Field work. As well she might. A mirror is, in this artist’s view, something that is simultaneously itself, and something else. A mirror is what it reflects, as much as it might be an inanimate household, bathroom, commercial or security object. Indeed, we might also regard a mirror as only coming into existence when it reflects that which comes in front of it. It was, and is, these fascinating questions of perception that locate themselves at the core of Stephanie’s practice.

For a while Stephanie’s work reflected an interest in the decidedly military preoccupation of camouflage, the disguising of armed forces personnel, equipment, buildings and installations by painting or covering them to make them blend in with their surroundings. Successful camouflage – the ability to hide things in plain sight, from whole factories or tanks on the ground through to battleships at sea – requires enormous nerve, creativity and indeed playfulness. Perhaps nothing quite evokes Stephanie’s interplay between the real and the non-real as much as her investigations of camouflage and even the most casual observer of her practice can determine the pronounced intellectual playfulness located at the core of her work.

The device that Stephanie employs, time and again, in the making of her work is assemblage – the three-dimensional equivalent of collage. She has found that the Frankenstein-like grafting together of apparently disparate and incongruous objects is perfectly able to encapsulate and convey meaning, far more so than any linear or literal creation that an artist might make. Her work triggers within our imagination no end of meanings, some diabolical and sinister, others much more enlightening or playful. But all of them born of the artist’s skillful work undertaken in her studio or the other locations within which she has placed herself. Deconstruction is of course the counter component to assembly, or assemblage, and to this end Stephanie’s work oftentimes involves the creative destruction of objects, as much as it does the creating of startling juxtapositions.

Stephanie’s making process has been described as “more reckless than scientific – improvising often at speed with assemblage, scale, collage, lighting and reflection and working towards the construction of a landscape of unexpected visual incidents.” And yet, a healthy regard for science is clearly discernible within her work. As she herself has observed, what links science to art is the eye, so in this regard, scientists and artists perhaps have more in common than is readily presumed. Not that Stephanie is enthralled by science. To the contrary, her work reflects and embodies a necessary scepticism. As well it might. In many instances, though we tend to place great store by what we can see, (or perhaps more importantly, what we think we see) our reliance on this particular sense costs us dearly, because, as Stephanie’s earlier and ongoing investigations into camouflage have shown, the eye is prone to remarkable deception. As far as she is concerned, the eyes most assuredly do not have it.

Eddie Chambers
November 2013