How to write about Savage Beauty? Can McQueen be captured in an Exhibition..or in the limited bubble of a post?  The answer is no, but one has to try.  So I’m writing this with the sound track to Schindler’s list playing in the background – it’s an earworm from the exhibition I’ll carry in my heart for a long time…and has made me, for the first time in over ten years, order a piece of violin music just so I can play it myself, softly at night with the back door open..

Cleverly, rather than chronological, the exhibition is grouped in thematic moods: Romantic gothic, Plato’s Atlantic, Highland..each room with it’s own presence: feathery oily gloss, crow black, cloudy foxed mirrors, decadent gilt, hospital white, all dripping quietly with the dark.

Wandering, discovering, uncovering the rooms is like being lead through the Minotaur’s labyrinth in a time chopped and spun dream.

(All photos from Google..no cameras are allowed inside the exhibition)

The Cabinet of Curiosities at the centre is the living brain with flashing synapses and pulsing electricity: Barnacle breasted leather, swooping scooping skirts, spit and saw dust, rich blood reds, spruced and scarred, gossamer held on wings, flammable laughs, chicken feathers in a slaughter house, murmurs, whispers, the glint of gold, leather and bones that wink, the haunting and the haunted. We accept these creations for the sculptures they are, the devolution, destruction, superb craftsmanship and extraordinary vision often without thought for the true effort they took….the room that followed broke my heart.

 

Go without expectations and you will find Lee, the insecure anti-hero leading the pack, looking inside and always expecting the worst, his discomfort then projected outwards into pure magical McQueen creative gold.

 

Walking out was a strange journey back into reality.

Laters, Kate x