Through Manon Wertenbroek’s strained and sweating sculptures, Millen Brown-Ewens revisits Emily Brontë’s Gothic bodies to ask whether an obsession with surface aesthetics might reveal just as much as it conceals.
You’d be hard pressed to find a literary adaptation of late that’s ruffled as many feathers as Emerald Fennell’s reimagining of Wuthering Heights. Now, I’m no Fennel apologiser, but for all its faults, I wonder whether the charge of skin-deep superficiality is really so damning. The director’s preoccupation with surface aesthetics, glossy and deflective though it is, does not entirely belie depth. If anything, it attempts to render visible what Emily Brontë’s original text, in part, already insists upon: that the body, its surfaces, and its excesses are a site where desire, repression, and social tension erupt.
Brontë’s novel is thick with fevered bodies, haunted flesh, and attachments to the Gothic that refuse containment within the polite boundaries of Victorian subjecthood. Fennell’s saturated visual language and her characters’ horny indecorous impulses, translate this intensity into cinematic albeit — borderline pantomimic –– terms.
Emotions accumulate at interfaces, sticking to our skin, clothes and surroundings like lichen. We’re betrayed by the furrows wrought into our foreheads, beads of sweat that pearl at the nape of necks and the soft human hollows left in an armchair. Sara Ahmed puts it beautifully in her essay ‘Affective Economies’; “emotions are not simply ‘within’ or ‘without’…they create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds”.
For artist Manon Wertenbroek –– whose work found me, fittingly, at the wuthering heights of filmic hysteria –– the body is not a mere vessel of psychological depth but a mercurial surface where social and emotional repression become materially legible. In her wall-mounted sculptures, skin is experienced as a threshold: leather stretched across frames of metal, wood and paper-mâché to expose the bas-reliefs of morphic forms.
‘Skin functions in my work much as it does in a living body: as a site of transmission,” she tells me. “It mediates between interior and exterior, carrying information, sensation, and contact. It is where we meet the world and where the world meets us.”
The artist’s latest body of work forms a disquieting arrangement of composite parts at Rose Easton in London, where her solo show ‘In guts and heads’ opened last weekend. Despite their decapitation, some pieces feel uncannily humanoid –– a raised ladder of ribs and hollow cavity of a pelvis comprising Self-(re)production for example –– yet for the most part, they evince the residual embodiments of motion and memory.
To this end, Wertenbroek cultivates an aesthetic that is both abstractly erotic and unsettling, a spectacle of a body in transition, straining against the rigidity of its frame. At times they appear to emerge or regenerate, almost in gestation or convulsions of ecstasy; at others, they teeter on the brink of collapse, decay, or total disappearance. “My sculptures hold an ambiguity,” she explains, “expressing the physical manifestations of desire, vulnerability, and importantly, the longing to exceed one’s own limits.”
Georges Bataille wrote that “between one being and another, there is a discontinuity.” Flesh marks the limits of our individuality and there are, in his view, few exceptions where it dissolves: in sex, physical punishment and most absolutely, in death.
Brontë’s Cathy and Heathcliff are defined by their determination to transcend the boundaries of human physicality and subjectivity. Cathy says as much in the declaration, “I am Heathcliff!”, collapsing the distinction between self and other. Their bond is obsessive and transgressive, refusing the stability of societal norms and embodying the rupture Bataille identifies as discontinuity. Throughout the novel, violence and deaths’ promise of life beyond ordinary limits also loom heavy. Heathcliff’s verbal and implied physical abuse of Isabella, as Brontë presents it, hardens in Fennell’s adaptation into a violent parody of intimacy, rendered as a BDSM relationship. By replacing eroticism with domination and transgression, the adaptation gives literal form to Bataille’s claim that the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence and violation.
“What I find most compelling in Bataille’s thinking,” Wertenbroek reflects, “is the frustration he articulates about the condition of being alive. This impossibility of ever fully accessing the fantasised continuity that death might promise. There is something deeply human in that tension: we are bound, separate beings, always longing for dissolution, fusion, or transcendence, yet structurally condemned to discontinuity.”
Rather than illustrating Bataille’s concept literally, Wertenbroek’s sculptures function more as corporeal or psychic memories of the fantasised states of continuity that Cathy describes. In ‘In guts and heads’, the artist is, for the first time exhibiting a series of pendant pairs, bodies that meld together in supportive constraint as in My mother was my future as well as my past or otherwise grind and pierce as in Eat, compete, reproduce, repeat. “They do not symbolise transcendence itself,” she tells me, “but rather the body’s yearning for it.”
In the context of desire and dissolution, Wertenbroek also investigates notions of care. She invites a ritual of maintenance in which the leather sculptures are moisturised with lubricants –– glycerin and hand cream –– carefully massaged into bony pressure points. In humid conditions, or when too much is applied, the surfaces begin to reject the substance as if crying or sweating, establishing a haptic relationship between the work and its carer. “For me, the act is both one of care and fetishism,” Wertenbroek explains. “The sculpture becomes a semi-living object that requires attention. It asks to be tended to.” The resulting excess isn’t a tragic instability but a sensual overflow, recalling moments when the body exceeds its own containment.
The physicality of Wertenbroek’s practice confronts the precarity of our corporeal states in extremis. They drew me into thinking of the Gothic body, not merely as a metaphor for psychological turmoil but as its abject materialisation: sweating, fevered, leaking, often hovering on the precipice of death. In The Gothic Body, Kelly Hurley defines it as one marred by instability and degeneration; “ambiguated or otherwise discontinuous in identity”. In Wuthering Heights, we see this instability manifest in Cathy’s wasting flesh, Heathcliff’s necrophilic obsession, and the ghost that scratches at the window. In her film, Fennell abstracts bodily reflexes that refuse containment into the set design; a veiny flesh panelled boudoir, silver gilt dining room slick with condensation and lacquered sanguine floor: deadly apprehensions of what lay in store.
Wertenbroek’s sculptures, I believe, inherit some of this Gothic logic and apply them with far greater affective nuance. Perpetually wet, and taking on the (un)natural colourings of ejected menstrual blood, wet stone and a type of cyanosis blue that recalls strangled flesh, they canvas the body as a surface under pressure, where repression does not remain buried deep in some impalpable psyche but seeps outward.
Exhibited alongside the sculptures at Rose Easton are a series of the artist’s preparatory sketches. These abstracted anatomical studies, and the structures that emerge from them, draw on archival bodies that Wertenbroek describes as having been subjected to systems of violence, objectification and surveillance without consent. I instantly recognised in them a macabre Gothic fascination with the violation of a sacred whole; her references including bodies confined within psychiatric institutions, the war dead used for scientific research, and disarticulated anatomical specimens preserved for study.
Wertenbroek’s admixed realisations are, so to speak, in their third life. The leather she employs — mostly horse, lamb, and cow — begins as a by-product of the meat industry before passing into the fashion supply chain. Wertenbroek acquires what remains: industrial offcuts too irregular to be easily processed by machines, retaining the skin memories of the animal bodies they once sustained. The congruity of the flayed source material and the familiar corporeality beneath, places Wertenbroek’s sculptures within Hurley’s understanding of a body that refuses to “acknowledge any limitations to bodily plasticity” sitting “between species” and “undergoing metamorphoses into a bizarre assortment of human/not-human configurations”.
“There is a strong sense of tension and structural presence in their forms,” Wertenbroek says. “For me, they function more as metaphors for bodies that may have been repressed, constrained, or wounded, but that have transformed themselves. Bodies that have endured and reconfigured their own limits.”
Though the surfaces of Wertenbroek’s sculptures may at times appear vulnerable, translucent in places or close to tearing, the discomfort they produce is more a sign of intensity than weakness. For me, they illuminate the paradox of the refrain ‘skin-deep superficiality’. So much so, that even within the over-engineered intensity of Fennel’s Wuthering Heights, I am able to muster an appreciation for her employment of surface as an active agent, registering the emotions that normally remain concealed and unsettling any fantasies of a contained self.
In guts and heads by Manon Wertenbroek is on view at Rose Easton until 25 April.
