I am taking you on a journey To the Light, taking you through stages of my practice, thoughts, and considerations. After my last blog about what treasures lay in spaces and rewinding time, I met an artist with whom I started a conversation about the start of this work, about previous works of social housing and dystopia, about perspective and geometry and we analysed space and time and its complexity. The conversation is part of the work as well. An investigation in which I found new ways to look at possibilities in work and in making work, complex conversations and languages. He sent me imagery and source materials from 1950’s architectural books which has been fruitful.
Early source materials I was sent were images of modernist chairs. The chair in the photograph I had was held in the frame of a door and its window, a door to a new building that is full of possibility. I opened the door and stepped into another world….I started to paint chairs.
Whilst I painted the chairs Michaela Nettell printed a wonderful article within which I could not have found a better quote as to why it was significant to focus upon. “Its quite impossible to consider the building as one thing…its furnishings as another…The very chairs..tables..are of the building itself, never fixtures upon it. ” Frank Lloyd Wright
As I said in the previous post, Chairs are fundamental objects. My chairs just like the buildings are portraits of people. They are objects that carry humanity, feeling, history. They are in the paintings both fragile and solid. My investigations drew me further in through the shattered glass to the chairs, the tables, to interior spaces. I consider inhabitants, scrutinise their possessions, their structures, the stability or instability of their spaces. The walls in these spaces gleam and are imprinted with fingertips, breaths, whispers of existence.
The lines and symmetry of these chairs draw me in, it was a curious perspective challenge for me as well. I have painted several versions of this chair, over photographs and on canvases. In each one there are different interventions of paint and embroidery, different loaded spaces.
I blend masculinity in the chairs, their hard shapes with the softness and femininity of embroidery, the masculine and feminine unfold and embrace each other. They are bound together with stitching. They are scaffolded and held. “Threads that bind us…Hold us…Contain us. Bodies and psyches flit in and slip out…” Marion Michell. The chair references a loneliness, a certain torture in its suspense reminiscent again of Bacon’s chairs. Some of these paintings are extremely delicate, created on a surface of 10x14cm for which I use the smallest needle, the most delicate threads and cradle the chair in the palms of my hand as I stitch into it. It is a treasured chair, it has been given stability
The silver thread I use is so fine and difficult to use, you have to touch it delicately as otherwise the thread will turn into wisps. Threading one line at a time and guiding it closely so it does not find a way to snag and fall apart, it is laborious, slow, patient. I have to feelingly find where to pierce the canvas or the paper, guiding it slowly to its point of entry and gently moving it into a place of security, then pull it tight and knot so the thread does not unravel. There are many vanishing points and possibilities with threads. The thread in its action, intervenes across modernist spaces.
There is also a conscious referencing in using pairs of chairs about conversations. In reference to the riots the chairs are empty, the inhabitants disappeared, it also references the lack of dialogue that led to frustrations for to have a disempowered unheard voice, which is one of the most dangerous things to do in society. To not listen to the voices of society.
