Sean Jena Taal | Witch’s Fingers

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Sean Jena Taal, "Under the fingers, running," 2023

scanned ceramics. Courtesy of the artist.

Opening Reception: Saturday, July 8, 2023, 7:00 PM  9:00 PM

Sean Jena Taal’s drawings and sculptures of caves utilize a network of physical, fictional, and psychological spaces best described by the grotesque. The grotto, or the grottesca, previously described hidden, underground caverns such as crypts, but over time, the grotesque began to refer to that which is distorted or macabre. Like the grotesque, Taal’s detailed graphite drawing and a new series of sculptures balance depictions of natural cave formations with the potential for the sinister and the unseen to reside within.

Working primarily in exacting graphite drawings of cave interiors, for Witch’s Fingers, Taal also exhibits a new series of rocky clay and resin sculptures as they form into body parts of hands, fingers, and legs. Created to imitate the limestone depositions of flowstone, stalactites and stalagmites, these sculptures also suggest a state of pareidolia, or the perception of human features where they do not exist. These half-formed bodies not only resemble how a cave wall may look like a face in the dark but suppose the cave as its own living body, with skins of regenerative rock and fingers that drip and dangle.

Within the depths of White Scar Cave in Ingleton, England, lie The Witch’s Fingers, a stalactite formation that trickles limestone into yellowed, spindly fingers. Cave formations often take on colloquial supernatural names such as “Hell Cave” or “Devil’s Throat”. This naming convention suggests that amateur explorers are more likely to believe that the emergence of these rocky bodies have mystical or demonic origins rather than emerging from the slow deposition of calcium carbonate. Buried in subterranean worlds, Taal’s meticulous caves are grotesque bodies of mystical origin—evolving hybrids of stone, water, force, and time.