A Tower in the Sky

‘something Bates notices frequently [is] how despite our best efforts to communicate to each other, we so rarely manage to do so honestly or effectively. We are all operating in our own realities. Take for example, the textbook illustration she cites as influencing her most recent work. Two radio towers sit at opposite sides of the curve of the earth. One sends out a beam of microwaves – illustrated by a stream of parallel dashes – into space, missing the other tower completely. In the next frame, a spherical satellite hangs between the two towers, receiving beams from both towers, and passing them between each other. ‘A satellite…forms a link between two widely spaced towers,’ the caption says, ‘the satellite is, in a sense, a ‘tower in the sky’.’ Bates is fascinated by this idea of miscommunication, of two towers trying to talk to each other, but being unable to. Of how readily this situation occurs in daily life, and how inadequate we all are, of bridging the gap. 

…

For the past six months, Bates, who usually lives in Glasgow, has been in residence at Birmingham School of Art through the Freelands Studio Fellowship, a programme that provides artists with a one-year placement and studio within a UK university. This has given her the space and resources to work at a scale she never thought possible. When I visit the studio in September, an intriguing prototype is set up on the table between us – a five-panelled sculpture that uses a similar structure to the aforementioned Brane Multiverse (2025), but which Bates assures me, is to be built ten times bigger. Wall-height, semi-transparent dividers, that the viewer will have to physically walk through to see the work. On the first four, filmy surfaces, Bates has sketched loose, swirly lines that draw attention to the translucency of the mesh like manifestations on a window. But on the last panel she has recreated the image of the fallen horse and rider from Italian Gothic painter Simone Martini’s (c. 1284–1344), Blessed Agostino Novello Triptych (c.1324-1328). For Bates, this image is the epitome of failed communication. A messenger, unseated from their mount, the message they carry, unlikely ever to make it to the recipient. 

It’s funny thinking about this work in an age when messenger does not allude to a person with a horse and a satchel, but an application that offers instant text exchange. There’s something around this and Bates’s new body of work – a currentness that is at once at home with, and at odds with, the work’s retro aesthetic. The words that spring to mind when thinking about the project – connection, match, boundaries – are phrases ubiquitous with the rise of online dating, communication workshops and sex parties (of all things), yet in their muted pastel tones, and stylised aesthetic, evoke a bygone era.' 

- from the text “Dead Air” by Kirsty White