As a young teenager I had loads of time with nothing to do. Outside of school, the paper round, homework and housework, I spent a lot of time…staring. My imagination was never more captivated than when inside a good stare, usually with headphones on, listening to music. I stared most at the posters on my bedroom wall, willing them to come alive like in that A-ha video, but they never did.
I’d notice a peeled corner of wallpaper, how a fringed lampshade moved when I ran my finger around it, or the neat edging of my dad’s lawn where he’d squared off the grass around the rose bushes with a spade. I loved staring at class photos to see whose tie was squint or who had one sock up and one sock down.
If there was nothing else to do, I’d open my mum’s huge tin of buttons and swirl my hand through it, watching the kaleidoscope of colours move between my fingers. Looking back, I think my memories are strongest of pavements, train journeys, buses, shop layouts and parks because I was constantly taking everything in, without distraction.
So it was probably inevitable that I became obsessed with the MC Escher prints covering my boyfriend Alyn’s parents’ staircase.
Whenever I visited, I’d stand halfway up those stairs, looking into impossible universes I desperately wanted to step inside. I’d wonder for ages how a bird could seamlessly become a fish. How could staircases be two-sided with people walking on them upside down? There were reptiles in a book, then out of the book, then back in the book again. I’d never seen anything like it and I never could make sense of it, which is probably why I’m still obsessed with it 40 years later.
Escher somehow escaped the art world and became part of popular culture. You can see echoes of the Dutchman’s distinctive worlds everywhere, in Pink Floyd, in JK Rowling, in psychedelia and in films like Inception and Labyrinth. His famous print Relativity, the one with the staircases, even formed the opening credits to an episode of The Simpsons. That particular work occupies my thoughts so much that my next novel features a character who dies, enters the afterlife and finds himself at the centre of an Escher-inspired universe.
I hadn’t seen Escher’s work up close since those days at Alyn’s, so I was thrilled to hear that a major exhibition of the artist’s work was coming to Somerset House, featuring Relativity (1953) and the woodcuts Day and Night (1938) and Hand with Reflecting Sphere (1935), three of his creations I was obsessed with as a teenager. It promised more than 150 works alongside immersive, interactive optical illusions. I took two friends with me.
On arriving at the Embankment Galleries in the South Wing, it was immediately obvious just how busy it was. The door staff waved people through with tickets for both earlier and later slots than ours, and the first room was so overcrowded we skipped it altogether because there was no way of getting close to anything.
In the second room, the queue for the Relativity experience, where you can step into the famous perspective and appear to defy gravity – the thing I was most excited about – looked to be at least two hours long. It was baking hot and stuffy. People were shoulder to shoulder, all trying to find a way to enjoy what we’d come for – a bit of time to stare.
In need of air, we escaped upstairs where it was a little less crowded. There, we enjoyed the mirrored projection space, where reflective silver spheres and geometric patterns surrounded us. In the next room, I almost missed Print Gallery (1956), where I could step into the harbour town of the young man shown visiting and watch the picture swell, warp and fold back in on itself in another mind-bending loop. But as a queue formed behind me, I felt obliged to move on far sooner than I wanted.
Another interactive installation, based on Hand with Reflecting Sphere (1935), was brilliant. We really enjoyed it, but even the people in front of us were saying, “Hurry up, people are waiting.” I missed the entire Relativity experience, along with many of the themes that made Escher famous and much of the background to his life. The irony wasn’t lost on me that the exhibition I’d come to stare at the longest was the one where I felt most rushed because it had been so thoroughly oversold. That was genuinely gutting.
One must stare at Escher. It’s the rules. His work refuses to give itself up at a glance and I wanted all that 15-year-old-me time back. Please, Somerset House, stop letting so many people in at the same time. Even so, it is a truly fantastic exhibition, one to really marvel at. I’ll have to go back again to enjoy all the bits I missed before it closes on 6 September. If you never see me again, I was last sighted in the Relativity room.
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