Internal Species : Anna van der Ploeg, Erin Chaplin & Joel Sorensen

The subconscious reveals itself in slips of the tongue, sinking feelings, associations and visions, transporting passions, sly asides. Its impressions are recalled in equivalences, in degrees of proximation that aspire toward but seldom reach their essence. As with dreams retold, the telling more often reveals itself lacking. The stuff of the subconscious is conveyed, however imperfectly, by metaphor and simile, by that figure of speech which hangs on the most pedestrian of prepositions: like.

A simile, then: The subconscious is like the earth beneath a tannin-stained lake. To reach it, one must descend from the fluid transparencies above to the darkness below – beyond the light, where there is no warmth, and the weight of water presses against lung and eardrum. The hand, feeling blindly, closes around cold mud and dead plant matter. Yet on returning to the sunlit air above, buoyed upwards by held breath, one finds between fingers only a few grains of sand and threads of pondweed remain. The fistful of mud, however tightly held, is lost. But a memory of dark coolness persists, of the subliminal gloam. (Similes cannot contain the thickness, the density of that mud. It was like this, yet was not this. Words run thin.) Bringing together works by Anna van der Ploeg, Erin Chaplin, and Joel Sorensen, Internal Species extends reflections on the subconscious as it plays out across their respective practices, differently reflected in process and preoccupation.

All three artists engage a material immediacy, that the hands might remember something the mind forgets (granite grit, slick silt); none proceed from the clarity of a predetermined ideal. However visually distinct their work, this tactile quality is common among them, as is a shared attention to what that submerged matter might disclose. Anna is familiar with this subconscious mud, returning to it often in visualisations. That such impressions cannot be translated in paint, being possessed of a texture that resists description, remains newly surprising to her, however familiar its frustrations. The divergence between these imagined scenes and their notation continues to offer the artist insights into the intimacies of the mind and the nature of its images. Her figures and the recurring motif of hands appear not so much described as revealed, swimming up to the work’s surface (at times, these too seem tannin-stained).

Where Anna’s paintings have about them a certain translucency, Erin’s portraits are all opacity, their revisions and rehearsals accumulating in thickly applied pigment. Each reworking obscures what she terms the ‘ugly painting’ beneath it (ugly perhaps in that it deviates from subconscious projection). ‘There are so many incoherent works under my works,’ the artist says, their images dissolving and resolving with each successive layer. Complementing these, two of Erin’s tapestries, which share the title Meditations, notate chromatic and compositional wanderings in purely abstract arrangements.

Shifting into and out of figuration, Joel’s sculptures similarly follow an intuitive feeling for form. Directly carved in wood or modelled in clay, the latter later cast in bronze, cement or plaster, their shape and surface recall the slow labour of their making, each an embodiment of ‘time in mass,’ to borrow the artist’s phrase in reference to a river stone worn smooth. The resulting works, totemic and enigmatic, respond to and extend from the non-human, natural world – to which the subconscious mud essentially belongs. Lucienne Bestall, 2025