Marlene Smith: "Ah, Sugar" at Cubitt

Installation view, Marlene Smith: Ah, Sugar at Cubitt. London, UK
 

By ALEXANDRA DIAMOND-RIVLIN October 10, 2024

Memory is sensory: it can ring a bell or place the first letters of a name on the tip of the tongue. This interplay between sensation and materiality is the key ingredient of Marlene Smith’s solo exhibition, Ah, Sugar at Cubitt. Each piece is crafted from sugar in some form, from portraits printed onto bagasse fiber – a by-product of sugarcane processing – to sculptures made entirely of fondant icing. These works refresh the mind of childhood memories: the texture of powdered candy and the sticky glaze of countertops. It is a show that makes you keenly aware of the saliva in your mouth – how memory is mediated by the body and the body is mediated by memory. 

Smith’s sculptures are imprinted with her late mother’s belongings including adornments, tablecloths and clothes. The effect is a series of white, wafer-thin pieces with patterns resembling the designs children’s oversized fingers tend to draw in sand. Displayed on tables at different heights, the works are an uneven spread, each layer negotiating space like tiers of cake in an oven: Smith avoids overcrowding and invites close inspection. 

Installation view, Marlene Smith: Ah, Sugar at Cubitt. 

The idea that objects do not just simply allude to the past, but help us feel it, is the essence of Smith’s work. Marcel Proust described this sensation, recalling how the taste of a madeleine soaked in tea reawakened childhood memories: “The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it.” As I peer over Smith’s saccharine spills, inhaling their smells and watching the white dust rise, I find myself thinking about family heirlooms – the cultural insistence on handing down handwritten letters and recipes, photographs and furniture. Just as Proust observed, objects are charged with the potential to reanimate the past. The obvious malleability and sense of constant activation in Smith’s sculptures is another reminder of this possibility in materials: her work draws on how seemingly insignificant encounters with taste and textures can dissolve boundaries between memory and reality, the past and present.     

While traditional forms of remembrance – plaques, monuments, memorials – are built to outlive the impermanence of the body, this exhibition is fragile, brittle and ephemeral. As my craving for sweetness intensifies, I notice my temptation to consume the works, knowing that my desire, if turned to action, would surely hasten their decay. I want to taste the pieces and let the white particles dissolve on my tongue, though I wish their forms to remain. The surfaces of her portraits invite curious hands – their subtly frayed edges hint at a dissolution possibly accelerated by the intimacy of human interaction and transportation. The arms and shoulders in these photographs are bare, the salty skin exposed. It is this shared tension between loss and preservation that underscores the dialogue between her photographic and sculptural works. Both engage in the subject of grief – the experience of wanting to climb inside a memory of a loved one and live within its walls forever. Smith's work captures the persistent desire to preserve this memory through objects, to collect the things that maintain the sensorial dimensions of the past and the smells that make a home.

Installation view, Marlene Smith: Ah, Sugar at Cubitt. 

What place does hunger have in an art show? The idea of the audience as a site of desire is ingrained within our conception of art. That is why we use the expression “art consumption”. In visual culture, to witness is already to consume; seeing makes the aesthetics and ethics of art a part of you. Whether or not it is deliberate, Smith invites craving in a manner that brings this analogy to the fore. Smith’s art is not solid enough to satisfy the collectors’ requirements for acquisition: her practice opposes expectations of the art market which demands a rapid cycle of buying and selling. “There are days when I think”, confesses Smith in an interview published by Frieze, “What the hell do you think you are doing with this stuff? You’re going to have all this work that’s made in icing sugar, which is not going to last forever, so who’s going to buy it?” But, to me, the work is too precious, too personal, to be in the hands of the art market forever. I wonder if Smith feels that by creating fragile archives destined to disintegrate, she has not just embraced ephemerality but refused the politics of possession. Ah, Sugar has little to do with ownership or classification, it prefers to leave a taste in our mouths. WM