Liz Neal - Some Product

Life has a way of giving you what you want; just identify a theme and it will emerge - although be prepared to find it where you least expected it. Trogging around Argyle Square with a pram looking for the Sartorial Contemporary Art Gallery lead me to a strikingly contemporary execution of the embroidery that has been obsessing me since I saw that Eddie Stobart truck picked out perfectly in thread exhibited in a rural Norfolk church. This together with the lace-making sampler depicting a Volkswagen Beetle. Not to mention the knitted gollywogs and complete nativity scenes. And of course, Gally's incredible altar cloths and vestments.

Liz Neal, the artist currently exhibiting at the Sartorial, clearly spent some very intense time in the white box-like interior of the gallery working her stuff onto the walls, floor and ceiling of the rough and ready space, which apparently, and appropriately, used to be a porn studio. The scale is huge, the work is blisteringly technicolour lashes of flesh and figurative, decorative, graffitto portraiture.


Her compelling and rather sinister hermaphrodite muse appears in quite a few of the pieces, and the thick textural brush strokes ooze with the generous, capacious fleshy fluidity of blood and breasts and hard cocks and vagina's. This more often than not bound and masked with straps, gags and other porno paraphernalia, the odd bow tie and plenty of money shots, often with text blazing across it all, spinning out contextualizing teasers for its audience.

Once we had battled to fold down the buggy while art lovers squeezed through the narrow stairway we were entirely taking up wrestling the damn thing into the corner, we took in the terrible incendiary glamour pervading everything. Strings of pearls looked so gleamingly perfect but they were multiplying like Sleeping Beauty's brambles around the sphinx-like marble body of the subject; throttling him even as he reclines so calmly. The Horny Boys hold their wares with endearing frankness, the paintings looking as attractive as cheery collectable cards, lending them a benign quality which is arresting considering they are imagined advertising for prostitutes.

The embroidery was tucked in the downstairs room, in which crouched a series of smooth, calm canvases showing close up, langurous, uncluttered landscapes of green-toned flesh which were so intimate compared to the the crashing anonymity of much of the upstairs room. Amongst these hung two large, painterly canvases burgeoning with flora and flowers, with a key figure dwelling amongst it all, one in each, bodies swirling with texture and life - all stitched in perfectly executed embroidery.

The labour and skill were incredible, and the colours luridly and intensely beautiful, the depictions of flowers breathtaking for their classicism. The variety of threads make for a rainbow of colours in each tiny area, and yet the whole impression is as muscular as her other works. Gally and her revered fine embroidery teacher Eva (or was it Mary?) Clover (RIP) would be deeply impressed to see this work.

The whole exhibition makes you want to blast your way aggressively on with your life - to rub raw the sex and seedy side, to assimilate it, because, fuck it, that's us. Its a show about glorious self acceptance mixed with a fear perhaps of what does resonate, also perhaps of sex industry, use and abuse, but with a ballsy been there done that cynicism made beautiful.