I went to Joanna Jones' opening on 13 March at the old synagogue in Canterbury, now the recital room. The exhibition title was 'Make a friend of doubt', a title that questions the certainty of belief and acknowledges the importance of doubt and uncertainty when making work. The 3 large, tempera paintings hanging from the ceiling beams show the artist's ongoing concerns with colour – explorations of purple and orange: the colours of the robes of Catholic popes, Church of England bishops and Buddhist monks. The only other colours used in these paintings are black and white. It is as if the colours themselves ask the questions.
Incidentally, the opening had a party-like atmosphere and the music added an extra sensory experience to the whole evening: reducing the primacy of sight as a sense – you can tell I am reading Irigaray at the moment.
I haven't done much of my own work recently for the usual reasons. Too much other work. However, following a recent tutorial, I'm experimenting with drawing on white melamine as a way of exploring the everyday through materials as well as through the drawings themselves. It is actually really easy to draw on. Just by changing material I find I am working differently already.
I went to the Byzantium exhibition at the RA today. It is a show of beautiful objects, collectors' items, carefully labelled to show provenance and ownership; and that is its problem. Its all about ownership, collecting and curating as the ability to bring together objects from prestigious museums as if this was some heroic feat. There are some explanatory, didactic texts on the walls but the labelling of the objects is unilluminating, as if the scholars and researchers want to keep all the knowledge to themselves. Basically it is just a show as catalogue, but a catalogue that does little more than list the items and display them as objects of aesthetic pleasure alone. Its almost as if the curators were so dazzled by the all the gold and enamel that they could not see the need to set the individual items into their artistic or even social context. So while there is a text relating to the general history of the period, there is no attempt to relate the objects to the history or subsequent development of Italian or Russian art or even the art of the Middle East.
Alot of my work is about my intimate environment and relates to personal narrative.
Sometimes I like to make paired drawings, the second acting as a kind of correction. When finished though it doesn't matter which was first and which was second; which is the original and which the copy.
