My Head on Your Heart

Roberta Thornley

Tim Melville Gallery

9 June – 4 July, 2020

Reviewed by Nina Seja for PhotoForum, 18 June 2020

In Philadelphia, the Mütter Museum is a macabre encounter with the physiology of the human body, disease, and mysterious ailments. The museum of medical history depicts preserved specimens, suspended in jars of formaldehyde. This frozen state of animation captures not only the physical reminiscences of lives (however brief) once lived, but also the shadow of vitality that these specimens once had – or were promised. In Rome, the Museum and Crypt of the Capuchin Friars serves a similar purpose, with the addition of an infused Catholicism permeating the crypt. The bones and mummified remains of Capuchin friars create starbursts and kaleidoscopes, vignettes that remind the viewer of one’s mortality.

I’m reminded of these two displays and the weight of existence, its fleeting tendencies, and the casings it leaves behind with Roberta Thornley’s latest exhibition, My Head on Your Heart. The series consists of six photographs of balloons in various states and colors, though largely in primary tones. There’s an element of playfulness to the works, the disposable goods elevated to objects of contemplation. Balloons are automatically imbued with high-spirited connotations – moments of celebration, short-lived childhood toys, signs that say: Good one. You did it. In one, Red Balloon and Knotted String, a cluster of six red balloons are like plump grapes, a tangle of strings impossibly knotting them together.

But in the series, levity is the exception. The stark black backdrops and furred velvet sheen on which some of the balloons rest give pause to the forced messages of joy. In Green and Blue Balloons, there’s the pair of nesting balloons. A baby blue touching a larger green one is symbiotic – though different, they seem matched, as if two parts of a union: mother and child; yin and yang. In Pink Balloon and Floss, a flesh-toned balloon hangs down from a single piece of string. The bulb-like droplet, a sac of air, is ripe with potential. The rim is like a belly button, more skin than plastic.

Moving through the series, the last two arrive at decay quickly. In Silver Balloon, a balloon in pallid grey reclines against the black velvet, its skin puckering on its rapid decline. We know in balloon terms how fast this comes, how almost overnight it deflates into a sorry state. The dash of optimism is all but gone and one can almost hear the hiss as the air slowly escapes. In the last, Two Black Balloons, the rot sinks into the velvet. Black balloons against black velvet, impressive in their density. This photograph could well be suited to the Mütter Museum: an appendage needing scientific scrawls to both identify and create distance to just what it is in front of you.

To some degree, this is given in Thornley’s petite accompanying text, also called My Head on Your Heart. Wisp-thin pages extend Thornley’s considerations of the balloon and the body and their meeting points. It’s familial too, weaving through stories of the photographer’s grandmother, and mother, and then her own daughter. Four generations unified by air. Each excerpt calls up the preciousness of air, enabling human life to go on:

Of the matriarch: “My grandmother’s lungs were damaged for good by the TB. As long as I knew her she always struggled to keep her breath. When she spoke it was as though her voice and breath were passing through her body, not out of it.”

Of the mother: “Mum’s waiting to get an angioplasty procedure. I picture a tiny balloon filling her arteries. I imagine the surgeon sitting bent over with pursed lips, trying to blow it up. Have you ever tried blowing up a water balloon? They are small and difficult and your lungs feel like they will burst and your cheeks will turn to stone before you can finish. Whose breath will be in my mother’s veins?”

Of the photographer herself: “I dislike the feeling of my own heart beating. It makes me uncomfortable, like there isn’t enough space in my chest and in that moment breathing seems more important than a beating heart.”

And of the photographer’s daughter: “A balloon burst in front of our new born baby in the hospital. She was only a few hours old. The room wasn’t big enough to dilute the noise. It was so close that something inside me burst with it.”

This precarious oxygenated dance is shown to be all the more at risk when lungs are scarred and arteries are narrowed. The razor’s edge between the breath and its absence can be seen in Thornley’s lament: “If only the breath in a balloon could be gifted back to a lost one. I always feel sad seeing a balloon floating away in the sky.”

Though balloons typically convey lightness, they are, in Thornley’s work, weighty – more solid markers than flimsy moments of fancy. As is in other series by the photographer, the density is likewise present in the Rembrandt-like interplay of light and darkness. These echoes can be seen in 2009’s Couple in which two white stacks of chairs glow in the darkness and the 2012 series I Will Meet You There, which depicts rural youth at a moment of metamorphosis, reflected by the moody half-light.

The very nature of breath is transitory: gasps, yawns, and the steady stream of inward and outward movement. But in Thornley’s photographs, she succeeds in pinning breath down, containing it in a vessel also known itself to be temporary, if not immaterial.

Nina Seja is a writer and researcher based in Auckland.

Review supported by Creative New Zealand funding.