This is the paper I presented to the symposium at Both Ends of Madness yesterday:
It is a discussion of my approach to my painting She Walks Slowly into the Leith without a Boatman to guide Her
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Phoenix Egg
My work usually starts with a narrative and through the process of creating a single work, or a series of works that narrative is distilled. So what happens when the narrative is disappearing? When the central character of the story is experiencing a process of disintegration? There is a risk in that becoming the narrative itself. A risk I have explored here and am still exploring in what is turning out to be a new series.
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There are characters to introduce, Padma, my mother in law who is 92, and has a life experience that crossed oceans and continents both literally and symbolically, a child of Sri Lanka then Ceylon, in the British Empire. She was educated at a time when schools operated a sort of religious hierarchy, in a form of systemised discrimination. She learnt, as a result to rebel internally, and adopted schemas which meant all her life until recently she has managed the duality of external conformity combined with a strong internal resistance. She first came to Britain in the 1950s as a nurse in a TB isolation hospital and had great adventures some of which she still remembers. She later came to Scotland to follow her husband’s career and training in Perth, crossing the Leith in Edinburgh, as a wife and mother, a period that now draws a blank.
And then, there is Mark Rothko, (my sometime teenage goth crush), who created colourfields, and interestingly to me, set out to create a feeling of closing in. I saw these works for the first time when I was seventeen, and broken and lost in the heart of my first experience of grief. For me the Seagram images were absorbing, and gave me a sense of sinking into the dark space created by them, a chance to peacefully hold grief in my hands and examine it.
(Here I had a red Rothko Seagram slide form the Tate website which is allowed for a free symposium but not social media, so not here)
Rothko was also influenced by Jung, a wise old Grandad with a bit part… and the way in which mythology provides us with archetypes for understanding. And that is where I have gone for the landscape and symbolic content of the painting. The River Lethe (spelt Leith here to reference Scotland and Padma’s tendencies to sit in the eddies of memories which confirm her independence). A tributary of the river Styx, where swallowing the water was said to wash away memories.
Plastic Propaganda turned out to be a character in this story too. Working with indigo pigment in preparation for Sugar and Spice I was drawn to starting works with raw pigment as a way of pulling together my painting and object making which tends to start with repurposed objects, repurposed objects which have a symbolic meaning either in their original form or through the process of intervention, so referenceing Beuys rather than Duchamp . So why not repurpose pigments? A pigment which has an intimate symbiosis with intercontinental relationships and the history of Colonialism, in particular with India, the Bengal Indigo rebellion and its role in the independence movement that in turn allowed Sri Lanka a more peaceful exit.
While playing with the indigo I discovered its variability in texture and tone when mixed with various oil painting media. I did attempt rabbit skin glue, like Rothko, but found the pigment clumped and formed unsatisfying surfaces.
The indigo dissolved more evenly in oil painting media with a lot of help from a pestle and mortar. The process of using the indigo has been to build pull back and rebuild surfaces to create that space at the same time as allowing for the introduction of symbolic iconography including in the media itself. The surfaces have variations in the media used for application, but in this piece unlike other works I have created using indigo, the final varnish is uniform to create a sense of looking through a single plain, in a way creating a separation from the events happening, a framing of ourselves as viewers.
So when I started to create this work
to try to gain an understanding of what Padma was experienceing and to create a space for my own grief I wanted to create dark spaces where you might wander and be lost. To create a river Lethe where it was possible to wander endlessly in the half disintigrated memories, and the absence of a guide for her so that rather than reaching the other side by gliding over the surface in a boat letting the waters settle behind her, she is lost in the vastness of it all.
In Padma’s dementia there are moments, sometimes days of lucidity, and these often correspond with a rationally expressed wish to die. this is the light in the painting originating in what is left of her shadowy brain in the mists. And eventually that will be the ending of this story, for now though, she still wanders and we still experiece of the slow grief that the family feels for someone who is both here and not.
“Give me the waters of the Lethe that numb the heart, if they exist I will still not have the power to forget you.” Ovid
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And then earlier in the week
So I went down to Fulham earlier this week to see about this solo show in a private location, near the river and Fulham Palace. The river was silky that day and there were plenty of boats on it. I will wait until early Auguat to get confirmation of the dates. I was invited to apply for Parralax Art Fair applied and got in so will be showing there in October. I plan to pop along to the summer one this weekend.
And last night when I presented my paper, the first time in a long time and it was nerve wracking but a good thing to have done. Plastic Propaganda are proving to be the platform I need to give me thepush I need to do some more challenging things. They are also a lovely friendly group.
As promised I went along to North End Road and happily can confirm that despite the weak pound prices seemed pretty stable in the market, including plenty of European produce.
The shop £12.50
9 large vine tomatoes, 1.5 large broccoli heads, 2 sweet corn cobs, 2 large aubergine( fancy striped ones), 8 big onions, 9 big bananas, 3 bunches of spring onions, 5 garlic bulbs, 430g button mushrooms, 24 nectarines, 2 honeydew melons, 4 small cucumbers. Pretty good value and all nice produce.
