ALASTAIR MacLennan's Body of Earth 1969-1996 installation offers a cool, funereal space for meditating on the inescapable frailty of the body (and certain notions that surround it) when faced with a toxic compound of politics, power and pragmatism, specifically in the context of the conflict in Northern Ireland.
The main space at the Project has been bandaged with white gauze. The thin membrane creates a chamber within a chamber, but leaves this precisely-defined space and its enigmatic contents visible from the exterior.
Visitors enter this room, with its low false ceiling of gauze, through a small parting in the cloth, and they are immediately faced with a long white cloth-covered bench, as evocative of an operating table as an altar. Instead of an etherised patient, or the fixings of transubstantiation, the bench supports a mound of rubbled earth, formed into a kind of elongated pyramid. On either side of this main structure, two smaller, similar tables bear further pyramids of sifted earth and ashy soil.
Over the PA, a male and a female recite, in alphabetical order, a list of names; the names, an accompanying text explains, of all those killed as a result of the `Troubles' in Northern Ireland from 1969 to date".
Like Shane Cullen, Willie Doherty and others, MacLennan seems to be attempting to tiptoe into the field of commemoration without leaving his own grand footprints. This has involved him skipping the visceral effects which have often driven his work. At another point in his long career we might have come across MacLennan dressed all in black, squatting under a table with a terrorist hood over his face, as he appeared, for example, in Mean Wean in 1995.
In this context, however, such a presence would have sounded too shrill. MacLennan may occasionally have toyed with Hammer horror effects, but here drama has collapsed in the service of a new atmosphere. A sense of horror is still paramount, but here it is part of a refusal to let time dispense its palliative effects. In Body of Earth, each death has bust happened, each grave has just been dug. Remembering all this - every shot and blast as intensely as possible, it seems, offers the only likelihood of escape from the gruesome past.