Safety Curtain

'I’m looking at one of artist Jennie Bates’s (b.1995, Edinburgh, UK) recent sculptures, currently untitled. It’s a miniature stage, the perfect size for a puppet show, or the kind of curiosity you’d see in town square in a historical drama. It’s made of cardboard and the curtain is painted on, but it somehow still captures the excitement of the theatre. Onstage is a yellow wheat field, an idyllic village in the distance. Stretched across the front is a sheet of transparent material, onto which the words ‘Safety Curtain’ are written first in large, bold capitals, and again beneath in smaller cursive text. 

The phrase names what we’re looking at, or at least what is represented: a fire-resistant screen designed to protect the audience if flames break out on stage. But there are no puppets here, and the threat of fire seems remote. The inclusion of the safety curtain then, isn’t about protection at all – it’s about exposure: about revealing the frame that separates stage from audience, and making us see the performance for the fiction that it is.' 

- from the text Dead Air by Kirsty White