Mary Herbert: From Mesopotamia to the Cairngorm Mountains

Sara Jaspan

Mary Herbert is a London-based artist and one of the 45 New Contemporaries of 2019. The annual open-submission exhibition highlights work by those deemed to be among the most exciting new art school and alternative art education graduates from across the UK each year. The 2019 selection was made by Rana Begum, Sonia Boyce and Ben Rivers. The exhibition is on display at South London Gallery until 23 February. A selection of Herbert’s work will also be shown at Art Hub Studios in Deptford from 26-29 March.

In ancient Mesopotamia it was believed that when we sleep a part of the soul moves outside of the body and travels to visit the places and people that we meet in our dreams. From the pallid light of Western post-Enlightenment, such ideas can seem more like stories, yet many still carry some kernel of resonance. Like death, our dream-worlds remain strange and largely unmapped territories that evade definitive scientific explanation. They are often populated with figures and landscapes we might never have knowingly encountered during wakeful hours, but which carry a sense of deep familiarity.

This same feeling lies at the heart of each of Mary Herbert’s colour and monochrome drawings. They present us with small windows onto views that carry the intimate air of distant memories, scented with the mix of sweet sadness that can accompany recollections of the past.

Despite this, not even Herbert has truly visited any of these places herself. They don’t exist. Most probably like our dreams, they are formed of a composite of feelings, lived-sensation, embodied-experience, unconscious processes and, lastly, direct observation. Sometimes they have their origins in found photographs of unknown locations or scenes she has never witnessed, but which somehow trigger an inexplicable tug of recognition. Other times, they begin in response to a particular spot or image she may have come across whilst walking that unlocked a similar effect. The physical prompt is less important than the moment, the atmosphere, the sensation felt.

During our conversation, Herbert compared the process of drawing what is before her to recounting a dream. Neither pursuit can ever be fully realised; the goal is too great and too amorphous. She tends to work on several pieces at once, mirroring the fragmentary composition of the slumberous realm. Like her drawings, her own dreams tend to be highly spatial or place-based and, when awake, she finds being outdoors and drawing to be important ways of accessing a space she loosely describes as the unconscious.  

Herbert defines her work as an attempt to capture and convey her inner experience of the outer world; a sentiment that seems echoed in the opening lines of one of her favourite books, The Living Mountain, in which the great nature writer and hill walker Nan Shepherd set forth: “it is to know the [Cairngorms’] essential nature that I am seeking here. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living.” As with all Herbert’s drawings, those she made in the Scottish hills during an autumn residency in 2019 could be described in similar terms; they are not of the hills but of being within them, as known to her through the process of living.  

Shepherd immediately followed her lyrical statement of intent with an acknowledgment: “This is not done easily, nor in an hour. It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of immediate enough import for our desperate problems.” Though the historic context of her words (written during the Second World War) is different to now, their meaning remains just as much, if not more relevant. Herbert’s drawings are made relatively quickly yet arise out of a kind of slowness; a slowness of perception rarely afforded by much of day-to-day life, that also requires a slowness of looking from us as viewers.  

It is hard to know how widely the sense of seemingly unaccountable recognition or familiarity that Herbert describes, and which lies at the heart of all her work, is felt. Yet, I feel it is one I recognise, both from talking to her and from simply looking at her drawings. Though likely a phenomenon that could be explained by science, I prefer to return to the ancient Mesopotamians. Perhaps its roots lie in the soul’s night-time excursions and we really have encountered these resonant moments before. After all, the process of living is hardly straightforward.