Carolynda Macdonald River of Lost Souls (oil on linen, 113cm x 105cm) Image courtesy of the artist and Kilmorack Gallery
‘I seek to bridge a recognisable world with that of an imaginary or mythological one. I almost always include birds as the main protagonists but have increasingly brought in human characters too. This alchemy of birds and fragments of old master figurative paintings, become vehicles for the subconscious to play and facilitate self-expression.’ Carolynda Macdonald
Working previously as a Biomedical Scientist in Microbiology, Carolynda Macdonald has progressively developed her painting practice since 1982, studying life drawing, printmaking and exhibiting extensively in the UK, USA, and Australia. Now based in Edinburgh, Macdonald’s recent exhibitions, including House of Macdonald with fellow artists Alan and Rory Macdonald, affirm her emergence as a distinctive voice in Contemporary Art. Drawing on traditions of painting in Western Art, the tradition celebrated by Macdonald is freedom of expression, art which is big enough to admit multiple layers of interpretation, making ‘paintings you can fall into.’ ‘Humanity being imprinted onto Nature’ is a strong theme in her latest work, where birds are threshold subjects, guardians of the natural world and human vulnerabilities.
River of Lost Souls (oil on linen, 113cm x 105cm) contains a scene of human betrayal, the cutting of Samson’s hair by Delilah’s accomplice, a removal of his supernatural power depicted by Rubens and reimagined here within the body of a bird. The brown, russet, crimson, and flesh tones glow humanely, emerging from a dark, cool, calm before storm background by the river’s edge. The human body is tucked protectively into the bird’s feathers, a safe space where humanity, emotion, and nature, within and without, can be examined. Poised on one leg, the bird’s gaze meets ours. This recognition, the confrontation of the eye of one species meeting another’s, is deeply arresting. It is a moment of tension that brings thought and feeling bubbling to the surface, in our immediate present and in relation to a shard of visual history. The painting is a threshold space and being held within spaces where land, sky and water meet, have a particular role in Macdonald’s art. She composes images of sanctuary for her protagonists and the viewer, alive with tension and burgeoning consciousness, full of possibility. This feeling of potential, psychologically and in the realm of dreams, is incredibly subtle and potent. In River of Lost Souls, who or what gives us strength, is given new context out with the Old Testament Biblical story and an art historical canon of Old Male Masters.
There are a number of genres and art historical expectations in play here, and Macdonald inadvertently subverts them all, bringing fragments of grand Master subjects into intimate focus, honouring scientific enquiry and ornithological art with feeling, and bringing untold psychological depth to the traditionally demure arena of still life. The field of enquiry is truly expansive, painted with meticulous detail and devotion to craft. It is the joy of painting and not politics that drives Macdonald’s art. We are free to interpret meaning and lose ourselves in narratives of our own making- that’s the gift and flow within her painting. In the presence of an artistic voice that elevates the mind and spirit, we can confront difficult things and begin to heal. Macdonald describes the music of Jocelyn Pook, Lisa Gerrard and Portuguese Fado singing in such terms, and the same is true of her paintings.
Carolynda Macdonald Beacon of Hope(oil on board, 25cm x 23cm) Image courtesy of the artist and Kilmorack Gallery
Carolynda Macdonald brings her microbiologist’s eye to the pattern of life and creates different spheres of awareness in the process. In Beacon of Hope (oil on board, 25cm x 23cm) we see a feast of finely painted flowers reminiscent of Rachel Ruysch within the body of a tiny wren. Although delicately rendered, the dark bird is alert, determined and poised in readiness on a natural stone, clasping a diamond in its claw. Broken jewellery is strewn at its feet, a microcosm of detail in a mountainous landscape of macrocosmic emotions and association. There is a jewellery box inheritance opened here and an uncanny, fleshly light which plays across the surface of lake and sky in the background. The artist creates an atmosphere of profound stillness, a place of solace, contemplation and in this case, an unsettling suggestion of relationships being tested. Macdonald describes the objects in her paintings being ‘broadly drawn’ rather than autobiographical. ‘Pearls are beautiful things to paint- glowing. They can abstractly solve a painting. What a pearl is, what it means’ also comes into play. ‘Pearls are a living thing, a grain of sand, giving all these things a different life in the work.’ Sometimes the placement of objects emerge unconsciously out of a brushstroke and Macdonald is simply enjoying where the mark takes her. It is an art of instinct and precision, that allows the human condition to be explored in all its nuances, ‘including inner turmoil and vulnerability, love and hidden desires, betrayal, motherhood, and protectiveness.’
Carolynda Macdonald Fortress of Shadows (oil on board, 25 x 23cm) Image courtesy of the artist and Kilmorack Gallery.
The intimate scale of Macdonald’s wren and robin paintings draws you in, often with unexpected twists. In Fortress of Shadows (oil on board, 25 x 23cm) the female form is revealed and protected within the body of the bird, perched on a silver jewellery box. The strawberries in the right foreground link with drapery which the female protagonist draws towards her body to shield it, her hand resting on the wren’s head. They are both vessels of potential narratives. The vulnerability of this reclining nude pose, seen so often in Western Art History as exposure for a male gaze, shifts to a more heightened state of awareness within, as if the threat exists beyond the boundaries of the picture plane, with the painting as refuge. The way Macdonald positions the female body gives it protection and agency -within the painting and the viewer, to begin to explore what this internal scene means to us.
Carolynda MacdonaldThe Scream (oil on board, 25 x 22cm) Image courtesy of the artist.
The Scream (oil on board, 25 x 22cm) is another powerful example, punching far above its scale and subverting the hierarchical dominance of large-scale History Painting. The combination of elements-still life, wren and jewellery, set in what feels like an 18th Century Arcadian landscape is juxtaposed with a fragment of Goya’s resistance painting The Third of May 1808, with civilians dying before a firing squad. Perched on the lid of a jewellery box, the open-mouthed wren omits a sound, amplified by the viewer’s imagination. There is a broken, half submerged ring or tether in the water, an intriguing detail that suggests shackles being broken on multiple levels. The potency of the scream, its volume and resonance is made by association, linked to the viewer’s awareness/experience and the scene of execution. There is beauty, horror and tension in this work achieved with consummate skill. The grand history painting is a fragment on the bird’s body, perhaps suggesting the relativity of human history when staring the current Anthropocene era in the face.
Carolynda Macdonald The Garden of Solace (oil on linen, 134 x 124cm) Image courtesy of the artist.
Our perception of violence in The Garden of Solace (oil on linen, 134 x 124cm) is tempered by how Macdonald leads the eye into the painting. The curves of the brown flamingo’s neck and beak direct us towards a fragment of Eugène Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus contained within its body. The extreme violence and chaos of this scene is repositioned so that we can actually be still with it and begin to interpret what is brought to the surface. It is a very powerful thing to give freedom to the imagination, both in the act of painting and enabling the viewer. This self -reflexivity is precisely what art is for, individually and collectively, to actively process what it means to be human, how we relate to each other and the natural world. In The Garden of Solace, the indifferent male ruler at the apex of Delacroix’s original painting is absent and the curve of the female body which mirrors the form of the beak opposite becomes more present. There is a sense of compassion and vulnerability that completely transforms the aggression of the original scene. The psychology and emotional intelligence of this painting is breathtaking. It is a wonderful example of the complexity and strength of art in expressing what often cannot be voiced or contemplated anywhere else. The beauty of these works lies in Macdonald’s ability to create a safe, yet gently confrontational space for a range of different emotions and experiences to be acknowledged and felt. ‘Removing the figures from their original context and narrative gives them a new life.’Sanctuary (oil on linen, 91cm x 64cm) may be dream like and reassuring, the heron presenting as a guardian of the three figures within, but the clouds and water, receding in tsunami-like fashion, reveal an unsettling atmosphere which the bird resiliently withstands. The fragment of art history, Solimena’s Venus at the forge of Vulcan carries its own mythology, yet the chosen fragment and trio of resting hands makes this feel like a familial scene, rather than a distant narrative of ancient deities.
Carolynda Macdonald Sanctuary (oil on linen, 91cm x 64cm) Image courtesy of the artist and Kilmorack Gallery
There are paintings where ‘rather than keeping these human figures within the birds’, Macdonald allows ‘them to break their boundaries and occupy a space between two worlds.’ In Where Spirits Run Free (oil on linen, 91cm x 84cm) figures float off the bird’s back, into a mythic landscape and nature’s elements. There is a sense of reverie in this action and in the handling of the background which feels made of us. It belongs to the Northern Romantic tradition of beholding the landscape/ nature and all it means to us, a quality internalised in Macdonald’s art, liberating the spirit.
Carolynda Macdonald Where Spirits Run Free (oil on linen, 91cm x 84cm) Image courtesy of the artist and Kilmorack Gallery
There is also a powerful edge in paintings such asRefuge (oil on canvas, 91 x 83cm). Here the female figure breaks free from the body of the bird, hands outstretched and gazing above, beyond the picture plane. Although we feel there is something bearing down on her, she stands securely on the bird’s back. There is love in every brushstroke and we feel we are in safe hands to unpack the unseen but palpable sense of threat. The poise of the bird and the presence of nature comforts, while the true scale of humanity can be scrutinised. There is a drive towards renewal in Macdonald’s art, a calling, like the doves in her painting Kindred Spirits (oil on linen, 113 x 105cm), ‘vulnerable things coming together in a hostile landscape who have called each other to restore.’ Crossing these imaginative thresholds, we may discover strength, resilience, and the joy of possibility within ourselves and the wider world.
Carolynda Macdonald Refuge (oil on canvas, 91 x 83cm) Image courtesy of the artist.
‘What interests me is the transformation, not the monument. I don’t construct ruins, but I feel ruins are moments when things show themselves. A ruin is not a catastrophe. It is the moment when things can start again.’ Anselm Kiefer
Wim Wenders’ film Anselm begins with the light of dawn, and a sequence of sculptures from Anselm Kiefer’s Die Frauen der Antike / Women of Antiquity series. The first, is a flowing, tethered white dress being slowly reclaimed by nature’s elements, the camera pans through trees, accompanied by an operatic female voice in German, then a duet of sculptural solidarity. The slow, sweeping camera movement allows space for contemplation and establishes an attitude of reverence. Emerging from many whispered voices is a declaration ‘we may be nameless forgotten ones- but we don’t forget a thing.’ This series of white dresses, with symbolic objects where female figurative heads should be, are immediately arresting and poignant. Pierced with shards of glass, crowned with razor wire, towers, a ‘Melancholia’ cube and lead books, they mine a deep seam of history, mythology, and association. They have a tense, poised elegance, of purity and violent unrest, not haunted as female victims but each a haunting, ethereal, and enduring presence. Time wraps itself cyclically around these forms. We feel we are witnessing an ending and a beginning simultaneously. The style- not entirely artist film and not entirely linear fact-based documentary may frustrate some viewers, but seeing Kiefer’s work to scale on film is such a joy, it eclipses all else. This is a film about the artist, experienced primarily through his work.
Often in Anselm there are moments of retrieval and reconstruction- in photographs, fragments of vintage film, snippets of poetry by Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, in German song and forest imagery, potent touchstones in Kiefer’s long career that inform readings of his art. The film is textural in the same way memory can be, and this movement of burgeoning awareness, which comes from inside the artist’s work, is what makes the film so immersive. I saw it in 2D, so can’t comment on the 3D experience, though I can imagine based on Wenders’ previous work that in 3D, appreciation of Kiefer’s immense, tactile art would be heightened in the cinema. Wenders’ 2011 film Pina utilised 3D magnificently in a riveting portrait of Pina Bausch that placed audiences at the centre of her visceral choreography. Wenders captured the life force and very soul of Bausch’s work. It’s a case of technical depth of field being used to explore the collective subconscious, a quality shared by Wener Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) where 3D added to the holistic experience of ancient cave paintings- not just as entertainment but a way of being in the world. When a filmmaker can integrate the vision and intent of their subject as part of their process, that’s when the magic happens! Is this film magic? Perhaps not quite in the way Pina was, but Kiefer’s vision on film is utterly compelling throughout.
Wim Wenders Anselm
Anselm Kiefer’s palette, diagrammatically labelled, places malen (to paint) eternally hovering between Himmel and erde (heaven and earth). His work is fiercely grounded and aspirational/ spiritual, qualities that Wenders honours in his approach, taking in the magnitude and concentrated detail of Kiefer’s art. There is a shared understanding of cultural roots by director and artist as part of the same generation, and a certain playfulness too, such an essential element in the studio, that permeate the film. When familial photographs are introduced, the camera movement is like a magic lantern slide show, framed by Reiniger-like forest silhouettes and punctuated by a hung figure full stop. There’s a visual language of discovery, that chimes with the child-self wandering through the film, a counterfoil to feelings of loss and exile, the aging artist cycling through decades of work and material. It is a warehouse of human experience of incalculable value, especially now. ‘You can’t just paint a landscape when tanks have driven through it,’ says Kiefer. Conscience becoming consciousness is ever present in his work.
Anselm is a poetic and deeply moving portrait of an artist, who perhaps more than any other, has grappled with the unthinkable – in 1939 Germany, or in the face of any regime in the present or future, what would you do? Kiefer is brave enough to admit that the answer is steeped in uncertainty. Born in Germany in 1945, into a society in collective denial of the past, Kiefer’s art taps deep into the human psyche. In his own words ‘I held a mirror up to everyone’s face,’ confronting the all-pervasive silence with works like his Occupations series (1968-69). Drawing on the German Romantic tradition and its systematic abuse at the hands of the Nazis, Kiefer is self-cast as a Friedrich-like lone figure in his father’s uniform. The elation of coming face to face with Nature is defiled by a banned salute, confronting human nature and societal taboos instead, in an act of protest. Kiefer’s monumental art which incorporates painting, sculpture and installation emerges resiliently from the rubble. He is insistent about ‘not forgetting’- the ‘open wound’ of history, our essential connection with ancient mythologies to understand, and the ‘unbearable lightness’ of what we are in the universe. He’s an artist who has absorbed the whole of human history and transcended himself in the process, as all great artists do. Seeing the expression on his face as he works undoes the macho cigar smoking. He is vulnerable, and to make connections across generations he truly needs to be, his art demands no less.
One of the great pleasures of this film is seeing Kiefer’s immense work, so exquisitely tactile in its encrusted, alchemical layers, beautifully captured on film by cinematographer Franz Lustig. From drone footage of the Kiefer’s incredible 200-acre studio complex in Barjac, Southern France, to the artist in closeup, burning pathways through a colossal painting with a blowtorch, using incineration to create a horizon. The collection of material, thought and action in his studio, the subterranean chambers of mind and epic architectural constructions are breathtaking. Experienced in the flesh, it is impossible to be in the presence of Kiefer’s work and not be moved by the sheer scale of consciousness and transformation, ironically born out of civilization in collapse. He admits that ‘nothing is part of being.’ I often feel intense loss when looking at his work, but I also feel hope in the making and Wenders captures this quality in the presence of Anselm’s younger self, played by Anton Wenders, the child that accompanies the adult artist throughout. The belief ‘that childhood is an empty space, like the beginning of the world’ carries hope within it. The same is true of Kiefer’s extraordinary work.
Anselm is screening in 2D and 3D in cinemas and streaming on Curzon Home Cinema in the UK.
Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, 28 July 2023 – January 2024
Exhibition book Scottish Women Artists, alongside Beatrice Huntington’s Cellist, c.1925 Picture Phil Wilkinson / Dovecot Studios
Walking across the North Bridge in Edinburgh on my way to see the Scottish Women Artists exhibition, I saw this poster by https://artistsforwomanlifefreedom.com/ and Jack Arts.
Billboard Poster by Artists for Woman Life Freedom and Jack Arts on North Bridge, Edinburgh. Picture: Georgina Coburn.
The central question posed by artist Abbas Zahedi stopped me in my tracks. This text, and the slogan above, ‘Woman, Life. Freedom’, used by the Kurdish Women’s movement and more recently in solidarity with Iranian women and girls fighting for equality, was a stark reminder of women’s rights/human rights in retrograde globally. The internal diagram in the left-hand panel by Koushna Navabi had a sticker applied to the womb, branded like a graffiti tag, perhaps reclaiming that space of origin. More disturbingly, the right-hand panel by Hadi Falapishi appeared to have been defaced, a section torn away to obscure the standing female figure with her arms outstretched. Cultures of oppression are everywhere- some more subtle than others.
Glancing to my right, I could see the banner over the City Art Centre for yet another capital male blockbuster – Peter Howson, whose testosterone fuelled paintings simply mirror the source of war and misogyny. Arguably a retrospective by Joyce W Cairns, including her large-scale cycle of War Tourist works, could have easily occupied the same space, bringing mastery of the medium and understanding of the human condition powerfully into play. Elected the first female president of the Royal Scottish Academy in 2018, Cairns’ astonishing body of work is represented by a single painting of intimate scale (Eastern Approaches c1999) in the Scottish Women Artists exhibition, a missed opportunity for the Edinburgh art world and the world visiting Edinburgh, to see the depth and breadth it has been missing from artists based outwith the central belt.
Although there are some incredible gems in this show, including works by Phoebe Anna Traquair, Bessie MacNicol, Frances MacDonald MacNair, Hannah Frank, Beatrice Huntington, Wilhelmina Barnes Graham, Margot Sandeman, Joan Eardley, Agnes Parker Miller, Frances Walker, Alberta Whittle, Helen Flockhart and Sam Ainsley, there are also many absences in the implied national survey of Scottish Women Artists. The exhibition mainly centres on works owned by the Fleming Collection and no doubt reflects historical patterns of collection and curation, as it does contemporary cultural accounting. The very term ‘Women Artists’, or ‘Women’s Art,’ has a host of associations pinned against it and I found myself wondering about how such ideas informed what I was seeing in terms of subject matter, institutional curation, and thematic bent.
While I can have no argument with the celebratory intention of the show, who remains unknown, or unshown, and why is a topic ripe for discussion, socially, culturally, and geographically. There is also a somewhat naïve premise in the narrative of this show, an assumption of superiority over the past; ‘In an era when women lead Scotland’s galleries and art schools, it is easy to forget the prejudices and barriers their predecessors have faced.’ Really? I think the question persists about how many women today are denied the ‘opportunity to seek or develop an artistic career’, or in a wider context, if they are able to pursue any career, the value attributed and actually paid for their work. The ‘marriage bar’ to female employment may no longer exist, but the question of equality and entitlement persists, heightened by the British Class system, the current cost of living crisis and the socio-economic conditions the vast majority of women consistently find themselves in. Yes, there have been strides forward in representation, but cultural attribution of value for women, together with equality, has a very long way to go.
Walking into the show the viewer is confronted with a polarity of art historical quotes; Artemesia Gentileschi’s battle cry ‘I’ll show you what a woman can do’ (1649) and art critic John Ruskin’s ridiculous claim that ‘There never having been such a being yet as a lady who could paint’ (1858). Perhaps more useful than a ‘Yes we can!’, ‘No you can’t!’ posturing is another quote on the wall at the start of the exhibition by Dame Ethel Walker in 1958.
‘There is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist- bad and good.’
In the spirit of Dame Ethel Walker, I have to say that I found some of the examples of work by Scottish Women Artists disappointing, particularly in the contemporary / final section of the show, which felt tokenistic, given the emphasis on 20th Century and earlier works. I left the gallery feeling unconvinced and wanting when I should have been punching the air. The title ‘Scottish Women Artists – 250 Years of Challenging Perception’ didn’t necessarily match what I saw on display – perhaps because it wasn’t challenging perception enough overall. Works like Alberta Whittle’s Entanglement is More Than Blood (2021-22, watercolour on paper) which articulates the complexity of identity so beautifully in its ever-questioning serpentine forms, contrasted sharply with works such as Rachel Maclean’s garish, simplistic treatment of body dysmorphia I’m Fine/Save Mi, 2021. Rug, gun tufted. Wool, polypropylene and canvas) or Sekai Machache’s Lively Blue tapestry (2023), which gains meaning through accompanying text. Based on an expressive abstract ink drawing and Machache’s investigation of the Colonial History of indigo, it is arguably not the best example of her work in comparison to the artist’s more challenging, nuanced film and photographic works.
Dovecot Tufter, Louise Trotter, adjusting Rachel Maclean I’m fine – Save Mi 2021. Picture Phil Wilkinson / Dovecot StudiosSekai Machache and Dovecot Studios Lively Blue 2023. Picture: Dovecot Studios
Sam Ainsley’s This Land is Your Land (2012, digital pigment print, on loan from Glasgow Women’s Library) with its coastline of word association and multilayered provocation, felt like a Rorschach blot test, facing and meeting forms of self-identification. It’s a work that like the best in the show, provides a trigger for questions, stories, and further explorations. Standing in front of Bessie MacNicol’s Portrait of Hornel (1896, oil on canvas, National Trust for Scotland, Broughton House and Garden) it is impossible not to feel the loss of an artistic trajectory cut short by death in childbirth. MacNicol’s paint handling and masterful, emotionally intelligent rendering of her sitter, triggers the imagination. In the context of this exhibition, what is most impressive is her resounding presence as she meets the eye of a fellow male artist as an equal, in every single mark. Her intention, all her knowing and understanding of medium and subject, her visual language distilled, still speaks 119 years after her death.
Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception
Picture Phil Wilkinson / Dovecot Studios
Many questions remain- what does it mean to be a Scottish artist or a Woman artist and who owns culture? Perhaps one of the most pertinent questions of all, triggered by a billboard on the way to the exhibition.
Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow 17 June – 9 September 2023
Pinkie Maclure Totally Wired (Self Portrait with Insomnia Posy) 2020 63cm x 72cm, stained glass. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Iconic award-winning artist Pinkie Maclure has been blazing a trail in visual art and music for over thirty years. Co-writing ten albums with musician and sound designer John Wills and revolutionising the art of stained glass, Maclure’s art is a potent, beautifully realised form of activism. Her ability to bring the most pressing issues and anxieties of our age into the light with power and compassion, resists dogma and triggers consciousness through imagination.
Maclure’s recent exhibitions at Homo Faber (Venice), Collect (London), the Outsider Art Fair (New York), the John Ruskin Prize (Manchester) and awards including the Sequested Prize, John Byrne Prize, Zealous Craft Prize and Jerwood Makers, have contributed to the artist’s growing international following. Represented in the National Museum of Scotland collection and private collections worldwide, Maclure’s distinctive voice as a visual artist, vocalist and musician has resounding impact. Her debut solo exhibition Lost Congregation at CCA Glasgow, is a thoroughly immersive and haunting experience. The show consists of three rooms of stained-glass, a 3D ambisonics sound installation and moving image, together with a series of live performances by the artist. In addition to new work, the exhibition is also a survey of key works from 2017-2023, including Pills for Ills, Ills for Pills(2018), addressing Britain’s opioid epidemic and Beauty Tricks (2017) a multilayered expose of the environmental and psychological cost of the beauty industry. (Discussed in a previous essay Pinkie Maclure– Beauty Trickshttps://www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk/pinkie-maclure-beaty-tricks-essay/ )
Tackling the enormous sense of grief and loss felt by many people seeing ecological collapse unfold in real time, Maclure offers a vision of hope and connectivity with Nature’s capacity for renewal. It’s this spirit that enables you to emerge from the exhibition having faced the reality of climate crisis, human displacement, and misogyny with a sense of empowerment and optimism. The central work in the show is Maclure’s installation The Soil (2023) with sound installation Dust Won’t Lie, written and sung by Pinkie Maclure with John Wills. This dark, immersive space envelops the viewer in soundscape and imagery, on the wall, projected onto the floor and in a stunning, large scale stained glass at the far end of the room. This abandoned chapel feels haunted and ethereal, but inviting, two staggered groups of cushioned pews and Maclure’s mesmerising voice, as if drawn from the earth in tonal descent, ground the participant. Tangles of dead branches and the crunch of leaves underfoot evoke a kind of passing. An expression of human experience and resilience, Somehow We Mend (2023), reveals itself in the gloom, the eye directed to the wall work by an extended branch. A red thread connects the hand of a figure to a sewn and drawn panel with words, some censored or obliterated by ink, burnt cigarette holes and a band aid.
I UNSTUCK MYSELF FROM
SOMEONE’S SHOE
PEELED BACK THE SOUL AND
WALKED OUT
ALL THE WAY TO
THE BROW OF THE HILL WHERE
THE SILK
HUNG FROM THE TREES
SOMEHOW WE MEND, SOMEHOW,
SOMEHOW WE MEND IN THE END’
Pinkie Maclure Somehow We Mend 2023, mixed media. Photograph by Alan Dimmick, courtesy of the artist.
This element of the installation is poignant and deeply affecting in its acknowledgement of lived experience, bringing the personal into what is historically held as a communal and religious space. Perception shifts in the shimmering projected light on the floor, where faces emerge and recede, like reflections in a pool of water, artist, youth, and crone goddess, digging deep beneath man-made architecture. Other elements of the soundscape provoke and soothe in contemplation, some are drawn from tradition, land and collective memory, the voices of women waulking cloth, a masculine voice in Scots song, calling children in from play, whispers, zooming traffic and the overarching statement of lament; ‘The Dust won’t lie.’ Is this because it is being stirred and disturbed, or because the earth and the dust we become speaks the ultimate truth? I find myself writing first about sound, because of the immediacy of being drawn sonically into the space, then there is light. Maclure’s large 3m x 2m stained glass is a revelation borne of all the thoughts, emotions and questions which swirl 360 degrees around the participant in the dark. In a reactionary age of fear and survival, Maclure brings much needed critical mass and ancient wisdom to the fore.
Pinkie Maclure The Soil 2023 3m x 2m, stained glass installation. Photograph by Alan Dimmick, courtesy of the artist.
Her gothic peaked triptych of stained glass is a magnificent centrepiece, largely comprised of salvaged glass from a ‘Victorian greenhouse that blew down in a storm.’ The use of material feels poetic and ironic, a composition borne of destructive weather patterns of the Anthropocene. The central figure is radiant with questioning, her head tilted, gazing upwards, a flaxen haired Joan of Arc-like protagonist, hands clasped in prayer. Gardening gloves, wellies and fishnet tights bring her down to earth and the stream of urine which becomes a flowing stratum beneath her feet anchors the human body to nature’s eternal cycles. It is Maclure’s response to the horrifying prediction reported by the UN that ‘the world could run out of topsoil in sixty years’, also drawing on the knowledge that human urine contains nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous, ‘nutrients essential to healthy plant growth.’ That saintly vision, deferring authority to a divine God is delivered squarely into our hands. We are part of the body of nature and can be agents of regeneration, rather than destruction, if we choose. At the base of the composition, plants, microbes, fossil and seed forms give a sense of propensity to growth, a cycle of life starting again in a discarded banana and mouldy pie sprouting seedlings. The fragility of glass and the fractured word ‘Frag’ ‘ile’ in the upper black and white world of the composition, meets the ‘Fragile’ complete, written red in depths of soil. The upper section dominated by humanity is filled with fractured lines and industrial wires, fallow plough lines and delicate marks like those of ink suspension in water. It feels like a dystopian future, which of course is now. The narrative unfolds in each considered element. Magic, rage, loss, critical interrogation, compassion, humility, hope, and empowerment circulate throughout the exhibition.
Future Daysies (2023) asks what will we choose to nurture as a species, a hand raised, pointing upwards, an illuminated nucleus of cell division in the upper right and a mass of potential life below, or is it just a bloody soup of destruction? The hand and the light lift the spirit in favour of resilience, with or without God, a refrain of ‘somehow we mend.’
Pinkie Maclure Two Witches (Knowledge is Power) 2021, 62cm x 100cm, stained glass. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
The idea of Future Daysies could also apply to Maclure’s Two Witches (Knowledge is Power) 2021, an unexpected vision of adolescence on the cusp of womanhood, coming into power and divining true agency. I say unexpected, because images of feminine youth, possessed of knowledge and potentiality are so rare. The words ‘knowledge is power’ written ‘in seven of the world’s most used languages’ wraps itself around the globe. Patriarchal societies excluding women are deposed by Maclure’s ‘winking owl’, ‘defecating on a freemasonry emblem’. Knowledge of the natural world is exalted in the torch attracting moths and self-determination in relation to one’s own body is celebrated in the flagpole flying a condom. It’s a powerful declaration of potential, and beauty in potential, that shines brightly in the darkest of spaces. Popular culture and oppressive regimes do not allow such expression of feminine strength and Maclure smashes the ceiling with her mighty, fragile art- it’s a wonderful thing to witness. Seeing visitors to the exhibition studying the intricate details, debate meanings and make connections with their own experiences was also a joy. This is what art is meant to do.
Completed ‘at the heights of the pandemic’ Maclure’s Totally Wired (Self Portrait with Insomnia Posy) 2020 reads as an awakening, not just from physical sleep or through a nightmare, but in the linear fracture of stained glass that rests on the artist’s forehead like a third eye. Intense blue and frenzied black drawn marks halo the portrait, with ‘the waving hands of friends on Zoom’ scattered above, ‘imprinted’ in the artist’s mind like a constellation of stars. It’s a response to horror and tragedy that reconstructs humanity, in the care and crafting of stained-glass. The split line pupils give a sense of altered perception and profound unease, contrasted with the warm toned, floral, lace textured blanket which the artist clutches to her chest. Held there too, is the comfort of Nature, a posy of herbs which in that moment is subdued by a man-made global crisis. The contradictory nature of Maclure’s art is true to life, in the profound need for confrontation and comfort. When I say comfort, I’m not talking about cosy distraction or denial, but the enduring, transformative action of hope, which lives first in the imagination.
Pinkie Maclure X-Ray Eye 2023, stained glass. Photograph courtesy of the artist
Although X-Ray Eye (2023) addresses a post truth world, the ‘twisting of words and fragmentation of social interaction’, it also recalls a strong cultural tradition of truth, in folk music and in the work of artists such as William Blake. Stephen Ellcock and Matt Osman’s book England on Fire, which features Maclure’s Green Man Searches for Wilderness (2020) taps into a seam of ancient knowing and divinity of imagination. In X-Ray Eye, Maclure’s female figure plunges head first, downward, like Blake’s The Simoniac Pope in the inferno. Though injured, she is far from helpless, flanked by opposing forces, fire and water, divided by argument, her hands pull words and assumptions apart, the fractured lead lines converging on her eye. The dominant colour within this space of exploration is the divine, sacred blue of medieval glass. Her sneakered feet straddle a portal of instinctual knowing at the apex of the composition. The body is fragmented, in a fallen position of discomfort, but there is also a will to understand that we feel will bring clarity, even in a climate of screaming opposition.
Walking away from the exhibition down Sauchiehall Street I saw a black and white poster with a lighthouse on it ‘The seas are rising and so are we’, a slogan adopted by climate activists. I had to smile, as the red, life affirming thread throughout Maclure’s extraordinary exhibition altered my perception of the world outside. ‘Somehow we mend, Somehow we mend in the end.’
Pinkie Maclure ‘Brigid in Dualchas’ (2022, stained glass and lightbox, 65cm x 62cm) Photograph by Tony Davidson, Kilmorack Gallery.
Radically transforming the art of stained glass, Pinkie Maclure’s latest work brings feminine power and the climate crisis brilliantly into focus.
Pinkie Maclure’s Brigid in Dualchas feels like a songline, tapping deep into the earth and our collective unconscious through storytelling. It is an image of origin, crisis and ultimately, hope. Illuminated in glass, a medium as fragile as humanity, Maclure’s Brigid takes full possession of beauty and rage. Rendered with consummate skill, this goddess of pre-Christian Ireland becomes conduit and cure, a contemporary icon of emboldening solidarity and potential change. All Maclure’s work presents the viewer with a knife edge of burgeoning consciousness and action, here contrasting ‘the old traditions and worship of nature with our contemporary abuse of nature and the resulting climate crisis.’
Brigid (Brighde or Bride in Scotland) is a deity of keening and healing, a protector of nature and an apt patron saint for the Anthropocene era we are living in. In a global context circa 2022, her luminous presence is a confrontation. Reappraisal of feminine power, not as ‘other’ but as an intrinsic aspect of all life and creation, has never been more urgent and cuts through all cultures and gender identification. Maclure’s Brigid is a sacred flaming red flag to reconnect with ancient, indigenous knowledge, not just to survive, but to reclaim life on this planet in all its eternal mystery and wonder.
The idea of ‘Dualchas’ in the Gaelic tradition, which ‘refers to the intimate bonds that exist between the natural world, the land and its people, transmitted through generations’ is communicated in the female figure placed centre stage, described by the artist as the goddess ‘in her element.’
Pinkie Maclure Detail- ‘Brigid in Dualchas’ (2022, stained glass and lightbox) Photograph by Tony Davidson, Kilmorack Gallery
Maclure’s composition is alive with free association. Colour radiates through layered glass in a strong, opposing palette of bloody red and divine blue, evocative of earthly and spiritual planes. Brigid is engulfed in red, a colour which drenches her arms and hands ‘Carrie’ style, while her softly glowing face, eyes closed, is pure repose. There’s great ambiguity here, between a defiant, enduring lifeforce and potential carnage being unleashed. Microbes on finely etched tree branches are underpinned by a vestige of pattern, akin to Medieval stained glass, shining beneath. The smallest details are held aloft by all that has come before, layer upon layer of concept, craft and understanding. In Maclure’s own words;
‘I sandblast, paint, fire, engrave and layer glass and relish the inherent chaos of such an unpredictable medium. The slowness of the process lets me access subconscious, dreamlike imagery and tell stories linking real-life, contemporary experiences with historical texts, characters, and events.’
Pinkie Maclure Detail- Brigid in Dualchas’ (2022, stained glass and lightbox) Photograph by Tony Davidson, Kilmorack Gallery
Pinkie Maclure’s art is a masterful union of ideas and technique which encompasses the entire spectrum of art practice. Like the figure of Brigid in Dualchas, the artist’s upward diagonal path of pure neon lightening may be framed in linear black and white geometry, but this in no way contains her. Brigid moves beyond the upper frame of the composition, pulsing with colour and energy. This petal like radiation of lead line, form and colour bring order and meaning out of chaos. It is pure Zeitgeist, but it is more than that.
The goddess is resolutely complex and complete, divine and human, seen in a Christ-like pose. Associations with the crucifixion, of suffering, sorrow and resurrection, not of God’s only son, but of the world are invoked. Saint Brigid’s feast day, 1st February, heralds spring or Imbolc, celebrating new life out of dark winter stasis. Maclure celebrates life giving creativity as an essential drive, in nature and us, linked with eternal cycles of life and death. Brigid’s clenched hands hold twigs like anode and cathode charges, grasping the mettle of all creation with open arms, much like the artist herself. Brigid in Dualchas is an image of feminine creative power beyond childbirth, in possession of self and body.
Pinkie Maclure Detail- ‘Brigid in Dualchas’ (2022 stained glass and lightbox) Photograph by Tony Davidson, Kilmorack Gallery
The stained-glass composition hinges on a ‘v’ of pubic hair, like the stem of a winged seed, the centre of a flower or a veined petal. It is an unexpected, radical bloom, presenting the female body in an uncompromising, completely organic way, ironically unseen for centuries. Maclure describes the red scratch marks on Brigid’s legs as ‘reminiscent of the graffiti you sometimes see carved into trunks of trees, reflecting the brutalisation of nature and women. Her legs are like the trunk of a tree, still standing despite decades of abuse.’ Significantly, the artist does not define the female figure with these marks. Maclure renders Brigid’s toes delicately mortal pink, her legs glowing pale green, not a deathly pallor, but one of burgeoning life and awakening. Leaves of green and yellow diffuse from her body and birds are silhouetted around a nest of blackened hair. There is nothing idealised here, jagged edges are part of the pattern and flow, held in radiant light. The fiery ignition of thought and instinct are all consuming, in making and seeing.
Maclure radically reinterprets the story of Brigid, ‘associated with perpetual, sacred flames, surrounded by a hedge which no man could cross. Men who attempted to cross were said to have been cursed to go insane, die or be crippled.’ The artist extends this idea to the current climate crisis, acknowledging the truth in the legend, of entire ecosystems. ‘Hedges are very important habitats for wildlife and for the prevention of wildfires,’ which have engulfed the planet. The element of fire, like the goddess herself is ambiguous and multifaceted, triple faced in her most ancient form.
The expression on Brigid’s face, a deeply meditative, active subconscious, calls upon us to collectively awaken and remember through ancient stories. The cathedrals of old encouraged the viewer to look up and be elevated, and in her own inimitable way, Maclure encourages us to do the same, reaching down through the foundations of belief to the site of origin, buried deep beneath the church. This is a different kind of power to that which currently blights our world, one that leads creatively towards hope.
The British Museum’s touring exhibition Pushing Paper: contemporary drawing from 1970 to now celebrates drawing as ‘a fully independent medium’ and reveals what a vital means of expression, innovation and renewal it can be. How we process ideas as human beings, what we know about ourselves, the world and our ability to reimagine it, is richly evidenced in this show. Pushing Paper is an exhibition of possibility and cross-pollination, which feels particularly timely, given that freedom of expression is increasingly under attack globally. Drawing is one of the oldest and most immediate forms of human expression with a deep, shared ancestry. It can be an artery of conscious and unconscious thought, a way of bearing witness and altering perception. Drawing reveals that there are many ways to be and see the world, and that the human mark matters, whether it is drawn, scratched, sculpted or walked. Even at its darkest, drawing is abundantly hopeful in what it enables us to see. Expanding the idea of drawing in its own right and making it more visible is arguably even more requisite in a post-truth digital age. Supported by the Bridget Riley Foundation (BRAF) this three-year project, co-curated with partner museums throughout the UK, is a fantastic opportunity to see contemporary drawing in its infinite variety.
Drawn from the British Museum’s graphic collection of over 50, 000 drawings and 2 million prints, the collaborative approach to curation, in partnership with the Oriental Museum, Durham, the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea and the Cooper Gallery, Barnsley, has produced a fascinating and deeply moving show. Presented in five thematic sections: power and protest, systems and process, place and space, identity and time and memory, the exhibition features 56 diverse works by artists such as David Hockney, Philip Guston, Rachel Whiteread, Cornelia Parker, Tacita Dean, Anselm Kiefer, Sol Le Witt, Anish Kapoor, Tracey Emin, Grayson Perry, Peter Doig, Roger Ackling, Liliane Lijn, Minjung Kim, Susan Schwalb, Nja Mahdaoui, Hajra Waheed, Marcia Kure, Hamid Sulaiman and Rachel Duckhouse.
Susan Schwalb’s Untitled, 1980, (metalpoint with graphite and burn marks on prepared paper) creates an astonishing sense of drawing as a living, organic force. Rooted in the Renaissance tradition of silverpoint, practised by Albrecht Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, there is a flourishing, dynamic sense of becoming in Schwalb’s series of four images. The feathery, smoked and scratched marks are powerful and delicate, melding process and idea to such a degree that they become a point of ignition in the viewer’s imagination. There is an uncanny sense of movement, flickering into light and illumination, that really captures the human drive to make art. The hand-made mark often demands that we pause, question and engage our senses fully in what we are looking at, in a way that the scrolling images saturating our daily digital lives do not. Schwalb’s work is such an invitation for active reflection. Her four drawings suggest parts of a flower and therefore the propensity for growth, coupled with the fiery inference of potential destruction. The fascination found in a naked flame is invoked here as mark and line, fan and flume, expand the idea of Renaissance metalpoint as precision rendering. Schwalb presents a Renaissance of drawing in fluidity and abstraction. There are so many lines of potential enquiry emanating from Schwalb’s quartet, revealing what a hopeful, essential act drawing can be. The spirit of exploration and ancestry of the artist’s chosen medium evolves before your eyes, and it is a joy to see.
Liliane Lijn’s Hanging Gardens of Rock City 1970 (Collage of magazine cuttings touched with green crayon, on a support of a greyish photograph of the New York skyline) presents a ‘utopian idyll’ of ‘green walkways suspended across the rooftops of Manhattan.’ Collage is an intuitive way of drawing that pivots between the act of cutting and sowing creative seeds of regeneration. Reconstruction of found images in this context takes New York Skyscrapers, temples of capitalism, and reappropriates them as accessible, linked green spaces. In Lijn’s hanging gardens, there’s no apocalyptic Babylon, but ancient wonder in imagination. Through a 2022 lens, Lijn’s Hanging Gardens of Rock City is a vision of what is needed today, platforms to reimagine and subvert dominant systems of power. Lijn also captures the spirit of awe and optimism in iconic New York architecture, ancient adornment repurposed for the New World, not as the domain of corporations and billionaires, but possessed of a different kind of inheritance and intention. The same year Lijn’s created her Floating Gardens of Rock City series of collages, the first Earth Day was held, a rallying point for US environmentalism and activism. Lijn’s Hanging Gardens bring an element of playfulness and ‘what if’? to this ongoing debate, gently suggesting an alternative trajectory in fantasy architecture. It is now widely acknowledged that capitalism/ consumerism has brought our planet to the brink of collapse, in the context of the Anthropocene period we are living through, Lijn’s Hanging Gardens optimistically heralds what still might be possible.
Minjung Kim’s Mountain (2009 ink on hanji paper) possesses a powerful rhythm of tonal ascension in wave upon wave of inky tidelines. Kim’s wet on wet technique is masterful in its acute understanding of material through touch. The way water absorbs, and ink reacts is part of the grounded nature of this drawing and the ethereal nature of this landscape. The singular ‘Mountain’ is made up of many successive peaks which gradually evaporate from dark to light. There is a strong lineage of traditional knowledge in this work, dating from the 1st Century BCE, in the ground of Korean Hanji paper, made from the Mulberry tree and in the artist’s reverence for the natural world. There is also the ‘Mountain’ in the mind of the viewer as an imaginative space in play. It was interesting to see how this work was such a natural draw for people entering the ‘place and space’ themed room and how much time was spent in contemplation of the drawing. Something emanates from these magnificent waves of water, ink and paper which feels like a collective well of burgeoning consciousness. There is a sense of connectivity when looking at this work, of being part of something greater than ourselves. Kim’s drawing captures something essential about our relationship with nature, bringing the root of Eastern spirituality, Western Romanticism and wider belief in divine nature together. The energy in this work is timelessly circular and direct, something sensed and felt through the hand of the artist, the work on paper and in the heart/ mind of the viewer.
Before you read the adjacent label, Cornelia Parker’s arresting Rorschach- style blot Poison Drawing (1997, Rattlesnake venom and ink) floats darkly on the page in free association. The unsettling mirror brown stain could be dried blood clotted thoughts,unlocked from the viewer’s own psyche. Initially the singular drawing is a trigger and feels like a test of projected meaning, in the manner of the original Rorschach test, used to examine the psychological and emotional characteristics of an individual. In a linked pair of drawings, Parker’s obsession with opposites is crystallised in material venom and its antidote. It’s an interesting moral proposition that walking into the gallery, it’s the visual stain of ink and venom in Poison Drawing that first draws the eye, while the white ink and Diamond Back snake anti-venom in its twin, Antidote Drawing 1997, appears invisible. Human behaviour (and creativity) has a double face, the potential for toxicity and cure. The ambiguity of Parker’s work is part of its charm, there’s always intellect behind it. Equally the element of artistic control consistently shifts- the blot will do what it wants to do, making unexpected marks on the folded paper. The inherent danger or life-giving properties hinge on what you’re told each drawing is made of, its material truth. Here drawing meets conceptual art, like ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail. In Parker’s own words ‘the work, as drawing, comes from the materials’ and that raw materiality, combined with concept and belief makes for endless connections and imaginings.
One of the most powerful works in the exhibition, one that stopped me in my tracks and that I keep returning to, is Adel Daoud’s Charbon de Chair (2014, Charcoal on cardboard). It is a summation of the civil war in Syria, a conflict that has claimed over 500,000 lives since 2011 and of incalculable loss, but there is also a powerful feeling of resistance in this work, a visceral frenzy of marks that insists we do not forget. Despite human erasure, a process of collective amnesia mirrored in the drawing, the artist in exile and the object remain living witnesses. Like Goya’s Disasters of War or Otto Dix’s Der Krieg series of prints, there is horrific trauma and life affirming strength in every line. Daoud’s drawing and its title ‘human charcoal’ is a pure expression of human annihilation and destruction, lived experience that perhaps only drawing could give voice to. With the Syrian war still raging and current obliteration of human remains by the Russian army in Ukraine to conceal war crimes, Charbon d Chair translates to sites of war and genocide around the globe. The danger of forgetting begets compounded horror in repetition. I was reminded when looking at this work of the words of Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel; ‘To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.’ The need for art to bear witness and act as a trigger for memory, not just in the artist’s own time but for all time, has never been greater. It is all too easy to change channels, keep scrolling, press delete or spread denial to millions on social media. Being in the intimate presence of a drawing, an immediately tactile object with its own history, that may be very different from our own, demands that we make sense of the human marks we see before us and grapple with where we stand. A great drawing makes its mark on the mind, soul and heart of the viewer and is never forgotten. The value of such work is incalculable, and I am glad that as part of this touring show, Adel Daoud’s Charbon de Chair will be seen by many more people throughout the country.
Pushing Paper – British Museum collection at Glynn Vivian, Swansea 24th September 2020. Foreground-Nja Mahdaoui The Memory Triptych (2009 Indian ink, acrylic and gold on parchment). Photograph courtesy of the British Museum.
Nja Mahdaoui’s The Memory Triptych (2009 Indian ink, acrylic and gold on parchment) is a brilliant evocation of human memory, how it shifts and evolves, realised in a fusion of drawing and sculpture. There are forms within forms in this drawing, from the tall clear glass vases containing three rhythmically charged parchments, to elements of Arabic calligraphy hidden by partially burnt, curvaceously twisting forms. The letterforms resist semantic reading, yet language, culture and identity are resounding present, not in being pinned down as absolutes, but in enabling growth and freedom of expression. The capture of this billowing movement of memory feels miraculous and precious, with gold overwritten on parchment. There is something very beautiful in what is hidden and revealed simultaneously in this work, about the way that we edit, revise and revel in memory as humans. The delicacy and refinement of Arabic calligraphy is rendered elusive, poetic and tangibly real in this multidimensional work. I would love to see works like Mahdaoui’s Memory Triptych displayed permanently within the British Muesum and partner museums, as an unexpected trigger for reflection on the evolving memory of other works in their collections.
The importance of touring collections, outside London to the rest of the UK and internationally, should not be underestimated. I was delighted to find, in the world class venue of The Pier, an exhibition who’s sensitive and thought-provoking curation made me feel connected to the world once again. Rather than being relentlessly overwhelmed by global events, the sensitive and thought-provoking curation encouraged connective reflection. Many of the chosen works restored my faith that we can in fact, out create destruction. The marks we make remain crucial. As the amazing diversity and integrity of practice exhibited in Pushing Paper testifies, Drawing stands resoundingly as both noun and verb.
The following poems Harvest and The Wave are responses to paintings by Joan Eardley held in the National Galleries of Scotland collection. For me, these two works encapsulate Eardley’s intent as an artist and the driven nature of creativity. I was also inspired by the following statements by Joan Eardley and Audrey Walker, which reflect dual aspects of Eardley’s personality;
‘I always identify Joan with the sea, and it is a valid identification. There is a gentle, sunlitsea one delights in, in the summer. And even in bad weather it is still a summer sea. This was the Joan I think everyone knew. This is the sea most people know. But there is a magnificent winter sea, in all its indomitable grandeur and wild, turbulent and terrifying splendour. This was Joan too.’ Audrey Walker
‘If you want experience of understanding and beauty then envy me now- but if you want happiness then don’t.’ Joan Eardley
I think Joan Eardley’s work communicates very powerfully our fundamental need as human beings to out create destruction, within ourselves and the wider world. The Wave and Harvest represent our deepest impulses, acknowledging darkness and striving towards light.
Harvest was published as part of the anthology All Becomes Art – Part One edited by Colin Herd and Sam Small (Speculative Books, Glasgow, February 2022.) All Becomes Art is a collection of new writing in response to the paintings and drawings of Joan Eardley, celebrating the centenary of her birth in 2021. Images of both paintings can be viewed on the National Galleries of Scotland website.
Harvest (oil and grit on hardboard, 1960-61)
Behind the village above the raging sea seed husks crack open like wings
The path is clear straight to the eye of the sun poised on the horizon haloed crimson white
in her fine-spun frenzy of marks blocks of shadow are broken by vanishing green and exploding yellow paint, grit and earth reaping sustenance
All life is here rendered in ecstasy the heart shimmers even as the wheel of the year turns from golden day to night
This is the moment inside this hallowed triptych when you and the world are made whole again.
The Wave (oil and grit on hardboard, February 1961)
To see the wave is to feel its fierce flowing light and a barricade of oncoming darkness loneliness ‘put away by painting’ borne on a leaden tide
Despair cuts like a WWI trench through wet sand a single, unflinchingly black rectangular mark stubborn as bitumen, delicately frayed at the edges like Rothko’s Elysium fields
The wall of water is unstoppable yet here she is, steadfast in quicksand holding back the tide for generations defiantly drawing a line that death may not cross
Beneath the industrial weight of Scots grey-blue we stand beside her in the gale, the earth our foreground and our end
The wave is a hand honed mark of burnt umber held close to the chest, the ‘i’ of Friedrich’s solitary monk placed pier edge and centre disintegrating like a pillar of dust in a hurricane, scattered like her ashes on this beach
Inevitably the wave hits, white foam gritted truth that knocks the wind out of me, scrapes me along the sea floor and leaves me gasping for breath. I feel the sum of all those days when hope vanishes and my soul scratches in a fever of life not to depart.
The following paper was originally presented live at the SSAH / Art UK Sculpture in Scotland Symposium, held at Edinburgh University in February 2019 and subsequently published in the Scottish Society for Art History Journal No 24 (2019-2020) Sculpture in Scotland issue in November 2019
Steve Dilworth in his studio, Isle of Harris. Photograph by Steve Russell Studios, courtesy of Pangolin Gallery, London
‘A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Is sculpture a chain?’ Steve Dilworth, early sketchbook, mid 1970’s.
Since the 1970s, Steve Dilworth has been redefining sculpture in his approach to making objects and handling of materials. Dilworth’s extraordinary work crosses many boundaries in terms of how we think about sculpture and art objects. 2019 marks his 70th birthday and the 40th anniversary of the Hanging Figure, a lightning strike in the history of art and a significant point of departure in Dilworth’s practice. It was the first of his works constructed from the inside out, a union of energy, concept and material that continues to evolve in his work today. He is one of the country’s most innovative, globally significant artists and I hope that this paper will be the start of a much broader conversation about his work.
When I first encountered Dilworth’s art in 2006, I was immediately struck by how powerfully distilled it was. Since then I have continued to write articles about it, gradually coming to terms with what makes it so unique and important, not just to me, but to many people around the world. In 2014, in response to the lack of information about the artist in the public domain, I began researching Dilworth’s work with view to writing a definitive biography, a story I wanted to tell through his trajectory of objects. First, I needed to see that whole trajectory. After discussing key works with the artist, forming the skeleton of the project, I started tracing, visiting and documenting as much of his work as possible.
By the end of 2017 I had documented over 500 works, a process which became rather like mapping the family, genus and species of living things as part of an expedition. These related branches of objects became the thematic vertebrae of each chapter and the backbone of the book, which I completed in October 2018. During the three-year research phase I conducted extensive interviews with the artist, his family, peers, colleagues, private collectors, curators and public collections from the UK, Europe and the USA. What motivated me from the beginning was the question of what makes ‘a Dilworth ’and why is his work so resonant on a global scale?
Steve Dilworth ‘Heart of the Thief’ (Sandiron, coins 1993) Photograph courtesy of the artist
Steve Dilworth was born in 1949 and spent his formative years in Kingston Upon Hull, Yorkshire. His earliest memories are significantly tactile, linked strongly to the natural world and to discovery through play, a quality ever present in his studio practice. He remembers a ‘profound experience’ as ‘a young boy,[1] when he defied the taboo of a do not touch sign at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, running his hands over a Henry Moore bronze while nobody was looking. It was a ‘tactile experience of form’ that ‘seeped through his skin’.[2] Returning to the Ferens in 1997 for his solo exhibition Earthing Memories, Dilworth stated; ‘It is this memory that has demanded an attitude in making sculpture. It calls for an integrity while making objects which carry messages and experiences of the future child.’ [3]
As a student at Maidstone College of Art, his interpretation of sculpture went way beyond traditional carving and casting. One of his early sketchbooks, dated 17 March 1970, records his assertion that ‘Sculpture is a name describing an object. What I mean by an object’ is ‘anything which is tangible, such things as thoughts, wind, emotions etc. Therefore, it follows that my writing must be sculpture.'[4] It was an idea that was not acceptable at the time. After he had left college, a chance encounter with the Isle of Harris stayed with him and in 1983 he and his family moved permanently to the island, a landscape he has been collaborating with ever since.
Dilworth’s international reputation has been growing since the late 1980s. He is renowned for his ground-breaking work using once living and found material, often held inside outer forms of wood, bone, stone and bronze. He also incorporates elements drawn directly from land and seascape, such as calm water, storm water, mountain air, the North wind and darkness. These are elements gathered at a particular time and place, in an exacting way that sit right on an edge between concept and material, the physical and metaphysical. He also uses the concept of sound and its absence in objects such as Air Rattle (1992).
Dilworth is fascinated with intersectional points between living things and material, reality, belief and the unconscious. He is an artist who believes that his job is to ask questions rather than provide answers. There is a sense of engagement with the inherent mysteries of life in his work whether in particle physics, Nature or the Divine. Life is acknowledged in its totality in his work, even those aspects we might deny, fear or despise. In nature you cannot have growth without death and decay – that transformation of core energy and awareness is a powerful part of his work.
The human scale of his work is as grounded as it is aspirational, from intimate hand-held objects to monumental outdoor works in stone, bronze and works in the landscape using animal fat, stone, fire and peat. One of the unusual aspects of his work is that it is crafted from the inside out, using the energy of raw material as the starting point, with as much care and attention given to the internal structure as the outer form.Often what is most valuable is hidden inside where we cannot see it. We have to believe or imagine it is there. The way the outer surface is crafted communicates the value and integrity of that process of seeing. It is ‘sculpture’ as a process of recognition – of who and what we are as human beings. We may have Google-mapped the entire world, but in truth there are many things which we (rightly) still do not understand and ultimately cannot control. The objects Dilworth makes acknowledge that baseline of human vulnerability.
Steve Dilworth ‘Ark’ 2000 Bronze, Nickel, Silver, Hooded Crow. Photograph by Steve Russell Studios , courtesy of Pangolin Gallery, London.
When I first interviewed Dilworth and asked what drew him to sculpture as a discipline, he replied;
I’m an atheist and an anti- theist. Art has replaced all of that spiritual side. So what it is to me is to try to make some sort of sense of what is a nonsensical place- of what we are. It is just exploring that and trying to understand. I don’t really see it as sculpture per se, but as objects and that’s what I make. For me the fantastic thing about making objects is that you’re making real things, they’re not about something, they’re not pretending to be something else, they are actually what they are- what it is in its entirety, whether you can see it or not.[5]
That grounded insistence on ‘making real things’ is one of his defining characteristics as an artist. This is not sculpture to be placed on a plinth or mantelpiece and admired from afar, but objects that connect on a primal level with the nervous system. During the wider interview process I discovered work passed down through families as invested objects, rather than inherited investments, creating their own narratives. They are objects that contain and exude their own energy in very profound and unexpected ways. Recently when Dilworth created a memorial piece in bronze, this precious object was not for display in a home or garden but intended to be thrown into a loch. Rather than marking a final resting place or fixed point in time, it exists as fluidly as human memory. Very unusually it is an art object not of possession, but an act of acknowledgement, a ritual of grief and loss, reconnecting those human emotions to cycles in the natural world. Dilworth’s progeny of Throwing Objects from the early 1980s to the present are for lobbing into an internal landscape. Some can be defensive, others are objects of comfort and healing on multiple levels. People recognise the gravity and intent of these objects intuitively, directly through the hands.
Steve Dilworth ‘Swift’ (Dunite and swift, 2012) Courtesy of the artist and Kilmorack Gallery. Photograph by Tony Davidson
The meticulous crafting of Dilworth’s objects communicates an attitude of respect and intention. Sometimes hollows are carved that connect your fingers with a certain trajectory and people often use these as meditative or grounding objects. Holding Swift (2012), in both hands, thumbs to eyes, there is a bodily sense of alignment with your internal centre of gravity, rather like the pull of a divining rod, linked to the body of the bird inside and to the idea of flight. The object also has a mysterious, mask-like quality, drawn from the collective, unconscious tribe of us. Although it is beautifully crafted, my experience through interviews is that people are not just reacting to the surface, but holistically to the work which seems to trigger genetic memory. In the artist’s monumental works and land works there is a very fluid sense of material and archetypal connection to form.
Dilworth’s Venus Stone(2007) for example, is crafted from tonnes of black granite, however this tapered form and presence defies all expectations of stone. Rather than being fixed, immovable and earth bound, it is at one with the changing weather and seasons in reflection, evaporating into the immense sky above, becoming air. Originally it was to stand on a base that allowed it to rotate with the wind as well, forming another axis of movement. The fertile, imaginative Feminine is undeniable in Dilworth’s Venus Stone and its masculine companion work Claw, in fourteen tonnes of black granite, is equally potent and elusive as sculpture.
Steve Dilworth ‘Venus Stone’ (China black granite 2007) Photograph Courtesy of the Cass Sculpture Foundation
When Dilworth took surplus frozen blocks of sand eels, which had been harvested for fertiliser in the Western Isles and wove them into ‘a burial shroud for the sea’ (Sand Eel Weaving, 1989), he was not claiming dominion over these once living things as an individual, but transforming human created waste into a statement of reverent care. Those tiny eels are the food and energy transfer within an entire ecosystem. The smell of preservation, a temporary halt to decay and the golden silvery weave of a precious cloak affirm what we know when we look at human impact on nature all over the world. Later in Sea Chest (2009-2010), which contains a sand eel cast in bronze, the concept evolves, with the precious metal and the once living object held inside.
The Isle of Harris is a great working partner for Dilworth. It is a place where he says he can ‘still see the curve of the earth’[6] and where evidence of geological changes millions of years old are out on the surface of the landscape. It is also a place where you have to come to terms with human history and your own presence and footprint, relative to the enormity of natural forces. Acknowledged in the earliest recorded objects made by human beings, this is art integral to life and our creative renewal. In many ways, Dilworth’s work has more in common with the prehistoric Venus of Willendorf (29,500 BCE, Natural History Museum, Vienna) than he does with his contemporaries. What is often forgotten in our digital age is that the origin of art was ritual and that the process of making fulfils a different need to the branded cultural consumption that now dominates our world.
Willendorf Venus Natural History Museum, Vienna, Austria. Image: Wikipedia Commons
Dilworth taps into human ritual and collective memory, describing himself as ‘a channel’ or ‘like an idiot being given keys to the library.’[7] Some people describe him and his work as ‘shamanic’. I see it as that, only in so far as a shaman is a leader who having absorbed the entire history and culture of the tribe is a keeper of collective memories, an individual able to penetrate the modern man-made barrier between the physical and spiritual. There is a very close connection with an entire cultural ecology in indigenous shamanic practices, an approach to our place on earth as human beings which in the context of 21st-century life is urgently relevant. Dilworth’s work may look tribal, but it does not directly reference other cultural artefacts. When folklore or other narratives emerge, it is often after a work has been completed and not consciously researched. Making is the research and meaning in itself.
Joseph Beuys used materials such as fur and fat in his sculptural installations, but Beuys adopted shamanism as a role, a way of fighting rationalism as part of a wider social agenda. He constructed mythology around his practice in installation, teaching and performance, that is very different to Dilworth’s use of raw material. Comparisons are sometimes made with Damien Hirst’s work, but this is also wide off the mark in terms of craft and intention. Dilworth was confronting the use of once living material over a decade earlier and, in Dilworth’s art, it is not the shock value or mythology of the material driving the object but the essential charge within it. That charge as concept and reality first came into being in 1979 with the completion of the Hanging Figure, where the synthesis of material created transcendent circuitry. Like the positive and negative ‘parts of a battery that come together with the chemical electrolyte between, it is a store of energy and the vital spark of electricity that creatively lights the world.’[8] It is an object of life, rather than death, creation over destruction.
Steve Dilworth ‘The Hanging Figure’ (Human skeleton, bovine heart, liver, meat, horsehair, blackthorn, seagrass 1978-79) Photograph courtesy of the artist
As the artist has stated; ‘All things contain energy. It is self-evident, and by changing their shape or position you can alter the energy or strengthen it. You end up making power objects and that is ultimately what sculpture is for me. It is not primarily visual art. An artist creates music, art or whatever but it transcends the material. Otherwise it is worthless.’[9]
The origin of Dilworth’s contemporary art practice is the unity of energy, concept and material inside this work. The Hanging Figure is a contentious and deeply humane piece which importantly raises many more questions than it answers. It is a fusion of human and animal, composed from a human skeleton (a decalcified box of bones bought from an anatomical supplier) and an unravelled calf including a bovine heart, liver and meat, bound together by horse hair, blackthorn and sea grass. It ‘represents […] a deepening exploration of the energies and origins of raw materials that have shaped all of the artist’s subsequent work.’[10] ‘Sea grass and blackthorn was used to bind, strengthen and articulate the spine; a knot tied left to right and right to left, creating a rhythm of lines, 300 in all connected to different parts of the body.’[11] Dilworth cites the ‘authenticity of the material, the energy of it’ being extremely important in the making of the object.[12]
‘If an object is anything it must contain its own power and be independent of time and place.’[13] ‘What you’re trying to do is make three dimensional poetry by weaving these elements, by changing the form and the density, you try to create an object that is stronger and more powerful than the space it occupies.’[14]
Although the exterior of the figure looks female, the skeleton is male, an interesting dynamic in terms of human psychology, identity and gender. The integration of animal and human feels true to evolution and of the way that deep rooted aspects of self can be suppressed in contemporary life. It is a work that makes the uncomfortable reality of what it is to be human visible again. However, it is more than a memento mori. Although reminiscent of ancient burial rites and mummification on the surface – this is not a funereal work. The Hanging Figure posed ‘deep question marks’[15] for the artist during the process of making and it remains one of his most polarising works, due to its raw, undeniable union of concept, energy and material. It is a work that has been exhibited in the UK, Europe and America. Sold in 2011 to the Richard Harris collection in Chicago, it’s a work that should never have left this country.
Taking the lessons of the Hanging Figure forward meant crafting objects the right way, with the right materials and intention, through the self-confessed ‘imperfect’ channel of the artist. This idea breaks new ground in Darkness I &II (1988) where the concept and technique are resoundingly equal. Two 14 x 12cm lidded caskets, made from lead, copper, brass, ancient bog oak and darkness are objects of human gravitas in pyramid form. The internal lead chamber of each vessel has a certain weighted logic, in capturing and containing darkness, as concept, energy and material. Regardless of the age, or our beliefs, the idea of darkness carries physical, psychological and emotional weight. There is also an edge of absurdity in trying to capture it. During an interview on Harris in 2014, Dilworth described the process of collecting the core material;
I chose the darkest time of the year in midwinter between the moons and I walked up the valley away from any natural light – the perfect natural darkness and sealed it up… What I like about that is darkness is quite tangible – steering perilously close to canisters of London Fog, but it is a material, on the edge of where concept becomes material. I find those barriers fascinating. I do realise there is a risk involved in it, in the work being overtaken completely by the idea, but I’m very serious about it.[16]
During one of our interviews on Harris, Dilworth described the process in bringing calm water to the energetic centre of an object;
I could go and get it again at an appropriate moment, but it is a pretty rare moment to get the sea that calm. I do save it- just in a plastic bottle, not kept in anything special, that would turn it into something else. I take some water out of the calm water bottle, put it into a flask and then syringe, fill it, squirt it out so it is rinsed with [calm water] and start again. With air, I would [also] rinse it out. Sometimes the air is gathered by sucking in, in a ritual and sometimes as a vacuum, but the intention is to get it as right as I can. Not just opening the two on the off chance of getting some into it. It must have a degree of integrity to it. You have to try, even if it isn’t perfect. That’s what it has to be. You do your best given what you’ve got at the time.[17]
Steve Dilworth ‘StormCentre’ (African blackwood, air taken from the centre of a storm depression, 1993) Photograph courtesy of the artist.
A distant cousin of Darkness I & II, Storm Centre (1993) (Fig.6) is another example of taking a seemingly intangible element from Nature and transforming it experientially. The outer form is made from African blackwood and contains a core of pure silver, holding a phial of air taken from the centre of the Braer storm in January 1993, the most intense extratropical cyclone ever recorded over the northern Atlantic Ocean. Dilworth described collecting the core material during an interview on Harris; ‘You have this particular moment when it’s utterly still, deep in the depression of the storm, an uncomfortable place to be. It was quite opportunist, when the storm hit I thought- I’ll just collect that.’[18] When I first saw this work I knew nothing about its origins – it ‘reminded me of a metronome with the pendulum arm removed, all time and rhythmic life stopped in calm violence. What struck me was the idea of containment, the healing properties of silver within and the close, straight grain of one of the hardest, densest woods on earth. If you placed this material in the emotionally conductive element of water, it would sink. Now when I think of Storm Centre I think of the emotive, atomic nature of that stilled core substance of palpable air, alive in the mind, inverted to a point, deep in the annihilating eye of the storm, expanding’ beyond the periphery. It’s an alignment of nature, intention and thought, an object truly “greater than the space it occupies.”’[19]
Dilworth’s objects carry no prescribed message, meaning or written explanations and there are only isolated instances of the artist using titles or text as a means of critical reflection. Ordinarily the titles of his work simply state the core material as the point of ignition. In 21st century art practice Dilworth is a rarity, a conceptual artist who consistently reminds us of the primacy of touch – ancient in origin, there at the birth of art as ritual and part of our genetic memory as human beings. His work brings us face to face with Nature and our own natures, in unexpected, often challenging and revelatory ways. The core energy of his work is the human drive to out-create destruction, individually and as a species, which is why his work is so pertinent, here, now, and for all time.
[1] S. Dilworth, Earthing Memories Exhibition Catalogue, Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston Upon Hull 1997
[2] S. Dilworth, Earthing Memories (n.1)
[3] S. Dilworth, Earthing Memories (n.1).
[4] S. Dilworth, note in sketchbook dated 17 March 1970
[5] S. Dilworth in conversation with Georgina Coburn, Isle of Harris. 25/08/2006.
[6] S. Dilworth in conversation with Georgina Coburn, Isle of Harris, 18/05 2015.
[7] S. Dilworth in conversation with Georgina Coburn, Isle of Harris. 20/05/2016.
[8] G. Coburn, ‘Chapter 5 Diversions in Natural History’, in manuscript for Journeyman – The Art of Steve Dilworth.p.6.
‘My favourite themes are power games and hierarchies. I always want to turn things on their heads to upset the established order, to change heroines and idiots…at the same time as loving the stories. I want to undermine them, like wanting to harm someone you love. Above all though, I want to work with stories that emerge as I go along.’ Paula Rego
Obedience and Defiance is the first major retrospective of Paula Rego’s work to be shown in Scotland, with a very timely focus on the politics of power and political agency. Featuring over 80 works from the 1960’s to 2010’s, it’s an intensive trajectory of self-examination and discovery. What I took away from this show, and what I know will stay with me, is the pure inspiration of creative protest and the towering strength of feminine resilience. As you move through each room, Rego’s intelligence, will and evolutionary craft are courageously forged in the mind. Informed by her thirty-year friendship with the artist, Catherine Lampert’s curation creates an intimate and appropriately monumental sense of Rego’s stature and humanity. Paula Rego moves very naturally between deeply personal and collective fields of reference. Whilst autobiographical or culturally specific narrative triggers are often the drivers, her compositions invite wider interpretation and debate. Rego’s art actively hands imaginative power back to the viewer in a spirit of free association.
The artist’s Girl and
Dog series is a good example, inspired by her husband’s battle with MS and
the role of carer. A viewer may know nothing about the personal history/
iconography in Untitled (1986 acrylic on canvas), but immediately
the positioning of the figure and the inferred relationship is unusual and arresting.
Firstly, the girl child/ woman is the dominant presence or agent in the image,
rendered in a way that embraces benevolence and malevolence simultaneously.
Cemented and entwined at opposing angles with a large black dog perched on her
lap, this isn’t just a girl with her pet we are witnessing. Despite the presence of yellow, lilac and
blue, the tonality and delineation are heavily set. The female protagonist’s
determined brow is only just visible, focussed not on play or the potential for
a walk, but about to snap closed the final link in the metaphorical chain
around the dog’s neck. The girl’s spiked yellow arm band and dress, which feels
like the costume for a circus act, has an edge of ambiguity and menace. In
another emotive twist, the dog is rendered empathically. Despite his robust form,
his black eyes are drained of life. He sits not just obediently, but with
resignation, staring ahead and beyond the picture plane, tended and equally
trapped.
These starkly defined figures, tempered by love, impending loss and resentment are on one level a double portrait of real life, however they also transcend the personal, presenting a rich seam of universal triggers and the possibility of multiple narrative interpretations. The archetypal examination of the caregiver role, the dynamics of power between an animal and its master, the balance or imbalance between masculine and feminine aspects of the psyche or within society, our capacity for loyalty and compassion, dominance and submissiveness, creation and destruction, life and death, are all at play in this work. Rego is consistently fearless in addressing the complexity of human emotions and desires.
In a similar way, Rego’s Dog Woman series, which has its origins in a Portuguese fairy tale, presents the viewer with hidden motivations and truths about the human condition. In many ways they reflect constrained civilization, fraught with frightening and liberating physicality of the animal within. Bound to their masters and existing on an edge between love and punishment, these are powerful figures of feminine aggression and sexuality, so often relegated to a corner of the room, the psychological belfry or society’s hidden basement. Rego courageously brings them into the light and into public consciousness in exhibition works like Dog Woman (1952 pencil on paper), Sleeper (1994 pastel on canvas), Love (1995 pastel on paper mounted on aluminium) and catalogue works Bad Dog (1994 pastel on canvas), Dog Woman (1994 pastel on canvas) and Baying (1994 pastel on canvas). The Dog Woman series is a highly significant body of work, not just in terms of Rego’s oeuvre and development as an artist, but for what these images represent in terms of the ongoing struggle for equality.
Throughout the exhibition, Rego emerges as an absolute Master of her art. Witnessing the distillation of her voice from masked abstraction to unbridled boldness is an empowering experience. Regardless of inherited circumstances, making art gives licence to explore what is forbidden, reinterpret history and initiate change. Rego’s avenging Angel (1998, pastel on paper mounted on aluminium) strikes me as not just standing at her shoulder in this respect, but as an unwitting symbol of her own right hand. Angel is an expression of compassion and action, with a sponge to taste bitter gall in one hand and a vengeful sword in the other. These emblems of passion and sacrifice are not just the artist’s Arma Christi, but feminine weaponry originating in lived experience and collective memory.
In a domestic image such as Sit(1994, pastel on canvas), we see the societal command of a title which pins the female protagonist to an armchair, hands behind her back and feet crossed, invisibly nailed in the manner of Christ’s crucifixion. It’s a timelessly stark predicament with the suggestion of pregnancy, dressed and upholstered in pleasing, demure florals. The woman’s eyes are directed above and it’s the whites of her eyes which hook in the mind and slowly creep under the skin. Sit isn’t just an image of enforced expectation; dutiful woman, wife, mother, but one ‘anointed’ with fear. ‘Giving fear a face’ is perhaps Rego’s greatest gift, because it is only when trauma is acknowledged that it can be processed and creatively transformed, individually and collectively. Storytelling is how we make sense of ourselves and it’s the retelling in Rego’s work, drawing on ancient mythology, folklore, popular culture and current affairs, that is personally and politically transformative. Her work is a reckoning with inequality and injustice, using imagination to affect change in the world and reimagine a different state of play. This ‘turning the tables’ of expectation, about what it means to be human, female and an artist, is a defining characteristic of her practice.
Rage against oppression
and inequality have always been present in Rego’s art. From her early 1952 pencil
drawing Dog Woman in a crouched position rabidly barring her
teeth, to ‘violent cutting’ of The Imposter (1964 oil and mixed
media on paper collage and canvas), and later pastels tackling human atrocities
such as war, anti-abortion legislation, FGM and sex trafficking. Throughout her
career, she has always grappled with human nature and its contradictions, never
shying away from our potential for complicity. Rego’s great strength and where
she really comes into her own, is in the dynamic suspension of all that we are
and are fighting to be, in taut, monumental pastels, dominated by female
protagonists. Her use of this medium is unexpected and completely transformative,
giving soft intimacy a distinctive edge of urgent, burgeoning consciousness. Rego’s
high definition pastels articulate rather than blend away truth. The artist’s
trajectory extends toward integration of masculine and feminine, seizing what
has been historically denied or hidden. Works like Joseph’s Dream
(1990, acrylic on paper on canvas) and Painting Him Out (2011,
pastel on paper mounted on aluminium) actively reclaim creativity, despite
enduring social hierarchies and the received canon of art history which casts
women as submissive or irrelevant. Rego actively embraces the desire and entitlement
of making images, traditionally assigned to “Masters”;
‘Painting pictures is like being a man, really. It’s the part of you that’s the man. Even the way you stand or sit, confronting the work like a man and it has to do with the aggressive part. It has the kind of push, the thrust which you must normally associate with what being a man is.’
Empowerment is doing and making, redefining yourself, your perceived role in society and its underlying structures in the process. In the spoilt, ego driven art world of the late 1990’s and 2000’s, Rego reveals what art can stand for and against- not just in her own time, but for all time. All great artists transcend themselves and Rego is no exception. Growing up in Portugal under the totalitarian rule of António de Oliveira Salazar, a highly repressed society in terms of gender, class and colonialism, the seeds of protest were sewn. In such conditions, expression becomes encoded and survival an imperative. Rego’s escape route, to Britain and the Slade School of Art in the 1950’s, presented her with a different set of cultural and institutional constraints to negotiate. Discussing her coming of age experiences in the 2017 documentary Secret and Stories (directed by her son Nick Willing) the artist’s congruence and openness about what it is to be female is still painfully relevant. While advances have been made and legislation may have altered in certain countries, class privilege is still the only thing affording freedom of choice for many women throughout the world. Every advance in the fight for equality must also be measured against the epidemic of modern slavery. The trafficking of women and girls is a growing industry which Rego makes visible in her work. The artist as witness has an incredibly important role to play in terms of political agency and visibly upholding freedom of expression, doubly so in a “post-truth” world.
A survivor of oppression and injustice is also a witness and this transformation of self-awareness is at the heart of all Rego’s work, extending far beyond autobiography. This powerful gaze of resilience is exchanged with the viewer in the Abortion series (1998-1999), where Rego skilfully reveals lived experience we cannot turn away from. It is full frontal confrontation with life and a rallying call to action, delivered without gore and in deliberately palatable colours. Rego defiantly makes unnecessary suffering visible to the world. Her direct response to the lack of votes in Portugal’s 1998 referendum was to create large scale pastels and etchings for wider dissemination, making female experiences of illegal abortion visible in the public domain for the first time. These images were instrumental in raising awareness about a taboo subject and aided the second referendum which legalised abortion in 2007. However, Rego’s Abortion series isn’t simply a visual campaign. Her series delves deeper than anyone else has dared, into the foundations of power written on the body and internalised. The way that trauma is held in the body as memory and physical response, strikes me immediately looking at Rego’s drawings, pastels and etchings from this series. Rego has spoken candidly about her positioning of the female figure in these works. The dynamic of tension created in blurring the line between anticipation of penetration by a lover and the abortionist’s hand is a deliberate trigger of profound unease. Untitled No 5 (1998 pastel on paper) is a good example, where the woman braces herself against the bed, legs separated by two folding chairs, dressed in a floral sundress as if on a date. The suggestion of seduction and violation are equally present. Although depicted clinically, the human need for affection, love and sex become disturbingly entwined with ideas of Romance and trauma in this image. The wider question of how we learn to become women enters the frame.
The dualism of human fear and desire within and hidden by institutions of church and state also join the debate. As Rego has stated ‘guilt doesn’t come into it.’ It is atrocious that it (abortion) is forbidden’, causing untold suffering and deaths that are entirely preventable across the world. Whatever your gender, life experience or beliefs, what Rego resoundingly confronts the viewer with is survival. She places her female protagonists front and centre, clothed in school uniforms and grimaced in pain, defiantly meeting our gaze. Untitled No 1 (1998 pastel on paper) is an image I returned to several times. A woman in a red headscarf and blue dress sits knees drawn up on a bed with a pink doormat beneath her. Her strong features and steady gaze are a counterfoil to the tension in her mouth and jaw. It feels like she is biting the inside of her mouth, waiting. Beside her is a patterned porcelain bowl, a refined vessel in contrast to the red stained basin and bucket stacked under the bed. The inference is that this isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last. The woman’s muscular poise in that moment are composed of absolute dignity, in the most undignified of circumstances. Her presence and right to be is undeniable, communicated in Rego’s masterful composition. The artist places the viewer in a position of potential complicity with her suffering, at bed height, our feet squarely on the ground, the right foot almost touching the protruding buckets. The reality of this work is inescapable in all its brutality and injustice, with shock supplanted by knowing and compassion. Even in the face of horrific, highly controversial subject matter, such as Two Women Being Stoned (1995 pastel on paper mounted on aluminium) or Mother Loves You (2009 etching and aquatint) from the FGM series, the artist creates a space for honest reflection. Rego’s work is raw and highly sophisticated in equal measure. Her magnificent triptych The Betrothal; Lessons: The Shipwreck, After Marriage A La Mode by Hogarth (1999) is another wonderful example. There is just so much experience, knowledge and insight in every panel!
Seeing the evolution of Paula Rego’s practice throughout the show is a triumph of self-determination. It’s an eternal dance between obedience and defiance that declares an unbreakable spirit with absolute clarity. Her willingness and courage to go wherever the creative process takes her, without a predetermined outcome, allows the artist to explore our deepest human drives. Rego’s rare, unfaltering honesty define her art and political agency, inspiring not just contemplation in a gallery setting, but action in the wider world. Grounded in everyday life, she works her magic, weaving stories and renegotiating the nature of power in the process.
William Blake (1757-1827)
‘Europe’ Plate i: Frontispiece, ‘The Ancient of Days’ 1827
Etching with ink and watercolour on paper
232 x 120mm
The Whitworth, The University of Manchester
‘I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Mans. I will not reason & compare: my business is to Create.’ William Blake, Jersusalem
‘Rebel, Radical, Revolutionary’, William Blake is an artist that exemplifies creative freedom and authenticity by being unmistakably himself. In the history of art there is nobody quite like him. He’s a beacon of imagination and hope in turbulent times and a brilliant counterfoil to 21st Century branded artistic production. Best known for his poetry and still a largely unsung visual artist in the UK, this timely exhibition presents the opportunity for reappraisal of his work- and what it takes to be an artist. Political, social and spiritual shackles appear symbolically throughout Blake’s work. The artist’s great legacy is breaking them, part of his unwavering belief that; ‘Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.’If ever there was a time to be reminded of the essential value of imagination, nationally and globally, it is now.
In Blake’s time, the French revolution and the American war of Independence challenged Britain’s perceived colonial “greatness.” The Enlightenment co-existed with slavery and the beginning of mass industrialisation; aspects of cultural inheritance that arguably have never been adequately addressed as a matter of national consciousness. Despite labels of eccentricity, Blake’s work and aspirations remain potent triggers for wider discussion. A very poignant element of the exhibition is the recreation of the Broad Street space where Blake staged his disastrous 1809 solo show and the adjoining room which projects his work on a scale not realised in his lifetime. Are we any more enlightened to receive this work? is a question that hangs over the exhibition space for a new generation.
William Blake (1757-1827)
A Large Book of Designs: The First Book of Urizen. Plate 7
1794
Colour printed relief etching predominantly in black, grey and pink, with hand colouring
145 x 105 mm
The British Museum, London. Acquired 1856
This is the largest show of Blake’s work
for almost 20 years, an overwhelming experience of colour, complexity and
vision, with over 300 works including watercolours, paintings and prints. Core
Tate works are joined by loans from the
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, the Huntington Art Collection,
California, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, the National Gallery of
Victoria, Melbourne, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Cincinnati Art Museum, the
Library of Congress, USA and private collectors to create a stunningly rich and
memorable retrospective.
I first discovered Blake in childhood and was instantly dazzled. I spent a lot of time in the library- not reading but poring over images in the art section. At the time I had no idea what Dante’s Divine Comedy was, but Blake’s ice and fire images of the Simonaic Pope and his kaleidoscopic Saint Peter, Saint James and Saint John with Dante and Beatrice seared themselves into my growing consciousness. His work made me intensely curious and hungry for more. Mysterious Hecate (now known as The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy), Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils and The Body of Abel found by Adam and Eve were, and still are, explosive, highly distilled revelations. The radiant energy of Blake’s distinctive line and the stylised muscularity of his figures are pure visual poetry -human imagination unleashed. He’s ‘the eye altering alters all’ personified, still living and breathing through his art. As I walked through this show, holding the hand of my younger self, the adult was no less awestruck.
William Blake (1757-1827)
Saint Peter, Saint James and Saint John with Dante and Beatrice
circa 1824 – 1827
Graphite, ink and watercolour on paper
365 x 520 mm
The British Museum, London. Acquired 1918
William Blake (1757-1827)
The Simoniac Pope
1824-7
Ink and watercolour on paper
527 x 368 mm
Tate
Like his frontispiece to Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion, (Plate 1 c. 1820 Relief and white-line etching with hand colouring on paper) Blake encourages us to cross a threshold, holding a lamp aloft to light the way. Looking at his work, there’s no doubt that he valued imagination above all else as the most divine human attribute. I love him and his work for communicating that truth, to be carried forward in dark times. In his Design excerpted from ‘The First Book of Urizen’ (1794 Colour relief etching predominantly in black, blue, grey and pink, with hand colouring) the human figure is cast between heaven and earth, feet in the clouds and hands braced against rock to break a collective fall. It’s a feat of mental and moral acrobatics rather than an illustration, frozen in time, primal and exalted. It’s the creation story of the human mind that feels like it’s predating God. While Blake illustrated many narratives from the Bible, John Bunyan’s Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer, his personal mythologies are among his most intriguing works. Seeing Blake’s illuminated books (bound and unbound) in this exhibition is one of its joys. Hand colouring defines every page as a precious, uniquely crafted work and an absolute labour of love- the most underestimated quality in all art making.
Love permeates Blake’s creations and it’s wonderful to see the contribution of his wife Catherine, who from 1788 was printing plates and helping to colour his illuminated books, acknowledged in the show. Ever ‘an angel’ to him, she supported and enabled his creative life. We’ll never really know the full extent of her hand in his work, but the contemporary observation that they were of ‘one soul’ can be felt in the seamless complexity of layered ink and watercolour. The epic prophecy and intimacy of Blake’s work is truly breath-taking, from the sensuous luminosity of Har and Heva Bathing, Mnetha Looking On (1785-9) from his first prophetic book, the poem Tiriel (1789), to the depth and delicacy of experimental monotypes like Pity (1795) and Newton (1795-1805). Colour and texture abound in these hybrid works, which Blake called his ‘frescos,’ initially ‘painting tacky ink on board and transferring it through pressure onto paper, enhanced with ink and watercolour.’ The highly skilled draughtsman and engraver becomes a painter, impossible to tell where one discipline stops and the other begins. As an illustrator, seeing this degree of experimentation in Blake’s work in print, tempera, watercolour and ink is exciting territory. Equally humbling are the delicate pages of his Songs of Innocence and of Experience which invite close inspection of minute detail.
William Blake (1757-1827)
Pity c.1795
Colour print, ink and watercolour on paper
425 x 539 m
Tate
Blake’s exact relief printing techniques, his sublime symbolism and intricate personal mythology remain largely unexplained. This is a show of tantalising clues to the artist’s identity and scope, with text and imagery entwined in the viewer’s imagination as the story of Blake’s life unfolds in each room. Arranged chronologically, the curation focuses on the conditions and patrons who enabled the artist to pursue his singular path. As a visual artist, he will always be a source of cryptic fascination, one who ultimately enables the imagination of the viewer. Multiply by each individual and the vision is infinite, such is his gift.
William Blake (1757-1827)
Portrait of William Blake 1802
Pencil with black, white, and grey washes
243 x 201 mm
Collection Robert N. Essick
Thought to be by his own hand, Portrait of William Blake (c. 1802–3 Graphite and wash on paper), crystallises a gaze that you cannot turn away from, uncannily present and utterly absorbing from the first room to the last. In final room of the show I was confronted by an image I hadn’t encountered before, The Sea of Time and Space (Vision of the Circle of the Life of Man (1821, Pen and ink, watercolour and gouache on gesso ground on paper), an eternal flow of life, punctuated by the full stop of Blake’s last work The Ancient of Days (1827, Relief etching printed in yellow with pen and ink, watercolour and gold body colour on paper). The interlocking design is intensely powerful, with saturated depths of smouldering colour and a God-like hand resting on the precision of a divided compass. Originally published as the frontispiece to his 1794 work Europe a Prophecy, a circle closes in this final version, in Blake’s words; ‘I’ve done all I can- it is the best I’ve ever finished.’ We could ask no more of any artist.
In a material dominated world, Blake’s work offers pure resilience in its distilled singularity and higher purpose. He’s a Romantic artist par excellence, transforming how we see through experimentation and belief in worlds beyond reason, made real in his extraordinary art.
georginacoburnarts 