Memory Foam

Layan Hell (Hellena Hueck and Maryam Fahim) and Ella Belenky’s first collaborative exhibition Memory Foam brings together accessories, paintings and found objects in an installation that elaborates a call and response between the practices – silent music of a fabric flute (Brushing on a Melody, 2023, Layan Hell) plays for the clip art outline of a farmhand (Banquet, 2023, Belenky). Belenky’s flat, collaged paintings incorporate imagery from advertising and stock graphics in colourscapes that approximate land and sky. Reproducing ubiquitously legible symbols digitally and from the imagination with indexical marks, Belenky works through apparent contradictions between sensorial experience and mass imagery. Strawberry, coffee pot and pillow appear detached, their meaning suspended, mnemonic. In a parallel ecology, Layan Hell’s wearables wiggle with the liveliness of natural and imaginative worlds. An egg springs from a metal pool in Pond (2023), a unit of potential. In other pieces, webbed and tadpole-like forms hint at creation stories. Integrating wax cast silver with found objects – Victorian buckle belt ring, wine stained cork – Layan Hell apply the mutability of metals to other materials, history prefiguring new stories, new life. Necklace, earring or keychain indicates a means of attaching. The motif in X-stitch yokes two parts together. And Pouch (2023) references Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which repositions the container (not spear or axe!) as the original technology, a place to put something you want and take it with you. Belenky’s Bird in Bush works riff on a street name local to her South East London studio. In the first, impressionistic tail feathers are uncoupled from any claim to place. The latter reproduces thethis construction as a sculptural diorama composed out of found porcelain, cardboard, magazine pages and a dead cactus. Half camouflaged in mirror ball tiles, the bird’s beady eye looks onto a viewer whose reflection fragments. This may be a clue to political investments entangled in Belenky’s post-internet visual language. At once: kitsch ornamentalism serving surveillance capitalism, and a tender care for its detritus. Asking: ‘to what are we attached, and how?’ Belenky and Layan Hell suspend symbols at the edge of memory. Overly literal associations in Belenky’s paintings abstract the meaning of figurative components in the work, drawing attention back to colour and line. Whilst intuitive and materially-led connections in Layan Hell’s accessories forgo rationalist or cerebral frameworks for attachment, in favour of something closer to the skin.