SPLITS: An installation of sculptures by Stephanie Douet

In autumn 2023 Stephanie Douet travelled to Split with her painting gear in a backpack. She was re-enacting the Grand Tour journeys of historic artists such as Edward Lear, Robert Adam and Lord Byron. The city had attracted her since she studied Roman architecture at university. The famous reconstruction of Diocletian’s city is neatly tucked into its verdant coastal site like a comfortably parcelled sandwich, chiming with the porphyry statue of the Tetrarchs plumped into their corner of St Mark’s cathedral in Venice.

Roaming the ancient city sketching, snapping, reading and chatting, other fascinating objects became absorbed into her project. A new area of interest is the intriguing constructions of historic Croatian embroidered clothes which show an amazing understanding and manipulation of material - a sort of textile architecture that conveys hours of patient homely toil. This appears in ‘The President Dances’, whose body is capped by an abstracted portrait.

Since the project is one of imagination, tangential objects drifted into the growing brew of ingredients. Did she see a Minoan vase with a smiley octopus face in the Treasury? this Diocletian/octopus appears in ‘Flask’. In the Treasury she saw a reliquary with the bones of St Dom, whose arms are raised in a way that reminds her of the folding harpsichord in Goethe’s Frankfurt home. The supplicating arms appear in ‘Album’, along with the arms of Douet’s spectacles. The small inset paintings depict sketches from around the city and seaside, painted en plein air.

process of collage creates surreal connections; ‘Dawson/Diocletian’, this time combined with the face of the northern comedian Les Dawson. Wandering around Split mosaics and memories of mosaics drifted into the cauldron of sculptural ideas. In ‘Prosthesis’ and ‘The Shards’ they become a stack of assorted fragments on the brink of collapse. Stability and fragmentation in historic sculpture always evoke the rising and falling of political systems.

There is a lot of fascinating documentation and writing about Brutalist monuments or spomeniks in Croatia. ‘Brutalist Traffic Director’ expresses a conflation between Roman and socialist times, with cheerfully decorative tiles painted on a delicate ‘Brutalist’ style form whose arms point dispairingly or beseechingly at the sky.

‘The Red Tower’ is an expression of holding conflicting ideas in one’s head at the same time - the push-me pull-you composition shows there is no right way up. Inspired by the dreamscapes of de Chirico and Piranesi, this duck/rabbit sculpture works whichever way it stands up.

The small paintings in ‘Tetrarchs’ present a sort of free-style photo album. From the left, the studio cat stands on a corner in an echo of the Tetrarchs (third from left), a brace of tetrarchs from the Antiquities Museum and the blobbly figure on the oval above is copied from a sketch by Edward Lear at Lake Como.