The exhibition currently on in Malvern Library - Mud-luscious - ends this weekend. On Saturday (25th March) Monica, Ahmer and myself will give a talk about our work and as I collect my thoughts I figured I’d include a few here in writing too.
When we first started talking about this show we talked about the thaw of spring. The dates coincided with the spring equinox and the days starting to get longer. For all three of us, after a slow, cold winter, our work was also starting to regain some energy. Although the connection with the natural world - particularly trees and fungi - is explicit in this show, I also wanted to think about the slosh of liquids in bodies and our relationships with fluids more generally. A childlike playfulness towards both everyday life and studio time.
My body is a furnace for oxygen and organic material. I am also an ocean, in that systems of liquids are forced around the container of my limbs and skin. It’s barely held together. I am pushing out of myself at all moments. Gravity plays a part in my function.
In Formless: A User’s Guide (1997), Yves-Alain Bois states: ‘Even if one no longer speaks of painting as a “window opened onto the world” the modernist picture is still conceived as a vertical section that presupposes the viewer having forgotten that his or her feet are in the dirt. Art, according to this view, is a sublimatory activity that separates the perceiver from his or her body’. What if you’re stuck in the mud? My interest in enacting liquidity is to upset the hierarchy of gestures that might be considered ‘above all that’ daily shit.
FULL FRONTAL: Body and Site, Melissa Gordon in Painting, Funny Peculiar (p.51)
Messy play
My practice is well and truly in the physical realm, up to it’s knees in mud. The process starts by making a mess - a mess like I wouldn’t think of making anywhere else. Then I spend weeks effectively trying to clean it up. From mistakes come ideas that take me in new unexpected directions. In painting I wash, stain, soak and rinse. The cycle of mess, cleaning and maintenance continues until the work either resolves itself or can’t go any further. In the first instance it is finished and in the second it goes into limbo, gets turned to the wall, waiting for the next cycle. There have been times when these works mysteriously finish themselves, which is always a little bit magic.
Kids are encouraged to engage with messy play. It engages their senses, is good for their concentration, imagination and motor skills, and they love it! Playing in mud exposes children to microbes which help develop the immune system and new research is finding more reasons to actually let your kids eat a little dirt.
Gordon is speaking not long after becoming the mother of twins. She describes being “at home cleaning almost constantly, wiping surfaces. When I went to my studio, I was also cleaning and reproducing mess as artworks”. I see parallels with my own experience as a parent here as well. Dirty bums, snotty noses, the vomit of a loved one. Playing in puddles. Making mud pies. But in the studio I get to be the child.
Paint as mud
I was talking to a famous art historian recently, and I asked him if he knew that different pigments weigh different amounts; and that if a painter were blindfolded and two different tubes of paint were placed in her hands, the painter would know which held a tube of cadmium red and which a tube of cobalt violet. The art historian said no, he didn’t know that. This was a shock: it never dawned on me that an art historian might have beheld color, but never held color.
On Color - (Amy Sillman, Faux Pas p.47)
The cadmium red that Sillman refers to is one of the most vivid reds: strong, opaque and with an orangey warmth. The pigment is created by a series of chemical reactions including the heated solution of cadmium, a toxic heavy metal, mixed with (amongst other things) selenium, a mineral found in soil. The resulting powder is ground with oil or other binders to make it liquid. Many of our pigments like ochres, umbers, siennas, chalk and charcoal come from the earth and have been used since prehistoric times. This turning of muddy elements into pure colour (and potentially back again into mud on the canvas) is the messy and unpredictable alchemy of painting.
Letting go
Just having a body is a daily comedy. From the control tower of the head, one gazes downward, always downward, upon this “loose, baggy monster” that we find ourselves in, this laughable casement that is the body below, as ankles swell, farts are emitted, rolls of fat jut out, the penis does it’s own thing. Shit happens and then you die.
Shit Happens - (Amy Sillman, Faux Pas p.150)
I’m thinking about all of this in relation to the body, to mud, to shit and playfulness: taking a stand against what is expected of adults (and what is denied us in mess - despite our leaky bodies, the lumps and bumps, and the hilarity of all these nasty fluids amid the daily grind). Is it not also ridiculous to push pigment around on a surface looking for the right textures, the right colours, the right compositions? And yet the essential nature of it is obvious to those of us who spend all our time at it. Why would we want to do anything else?
I’ve been reading:
Joanna Wolfarth - Milk: An Intimate History of Breastfeeding - Speaking of our bodily fluids… This is a beautiful book. Part memoir, part cultural history exploring the (often conflicting) attitudes and values of infant feeding and caring throughout the ages.
Lucy Jones - Losing Eden - About our vital need to connect with nature, for our health and our mental wellbeing.
Kassia St Clair - The Secret Lives of Colour (I read this ages ago but it’s relevant here)
Painting Funny Peculiar -this is a publication of transcripts and edited papers from the symposium ‘Funny Peculiar’, which took place at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.
And listening to these albums in the studio:
Ibibio Sound Machine - Electricity
Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul - Topical Dancer
The three above are for throwing some shapes, and these three below are for chilling out.
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, London Symphony Orchestra - Promises
Jon Hopkins - Music For Psychedelic Therapy and Singularity