TRANSLUCENT SPIRITS

a sheet painted blue by Lewis Ronald
Plastiques
May 2022
Selected by Claire de Rouen

I studied at the Royal College of Art with Lewis from 2007 to 2009. We recently reconnected when he wanted to show me some new photographs he’d taken at Charleston, the house in Lewes, East Sussex, where artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant of the Bloomsbury Group established a radical community, early last century. Lewis’ sensual and elegant multiple exposures reveal figures, clothed and unclothed, within the house and outside in the overflowing garden. I’ve loved the house for a long time, but always felt that the complicated sexual politics that played out between Bell, her husband Clive, and Duncan Grant (who was in a relationship with another man, David Garnett, and with whom Vanessa was in love) tended to be supressed by the conventional narrative surrounding it. To me, Ronald’s pictures conjure something of what must have been an intoxicating as well as melancholy erotic constellation between key figures of the early modern British avant-garde. – Lucy Kumara Moore