HAP: 'To cover, surround, enfold, so as to shelter, shield or conceal anything' (Scottish Slang, 1690)
Growing up my experience of canvas as a material was that of a water resistant cover (or 'hap' as it was termed) to keep rain and sleet from ruining bales of hay and horse feed, sometimes saddles and soap too. It wasn't until the age of 18 I saw my first oil painting hanging in a gallery, an unplanned drop into the National Gallery while waiting for an interview that I'd travelled from Glasgow to London on the bus to have. I didn't get the job, which was a sales assistant in a Saville Row shop due to open and offer luxury horse riding attire made of beautiful tweeds and cavalry twill. Instead I was offered the opportunity of a life time, to feature in an editorial piece in Vogue Magazine. The piece was about 'country bumpkin makes girl about town'. The task was to take on two or three part-time jobs, work out like crazy, learn to walk and dance, fix my hair and accent, and leave my entire wardrobe behind. Yes I said. Following a 12-hour bus trip home I told my mother of my life changing situation - the one and only time she aired an opinion and took command, forbidding me to allow anyone to tell me how I should look. That was that and I returned to working with horses, drawing strange figures on haps, day dreaming about the National Gallery... little did I know then the path I was to take, returning 40-years later to the same materials and wishful hopes.
What interests me is visually articulating the worlds that reside in me and cavalcade in my dreams. After years of oil painting on stretched canvas wondering why the outcome was raw, brutal, agricultural, unpolished, unsophisticated, and at times downright ugly, I concluded it might be time to give up painting. I'm better with clay after all. Something in me fell apart on the canvas, revealing and concealing myself at once. Over fifty of my old painted stretched canvases painted in the 1990's and early 2000s live in storage. For years I've contemplated busting them up, rupturing and tearing them apart only to stitch them together in a Frankenstein sculpture. Finally I bought some raw canvas and started throwing paint at it, revelling in the dripping that Pollock must have experienced. It is addictive. Before painting I soaked the clean canvas in the canal hoping for some stains, hoping to invite Nature to meet me half way. Next, instead of using oil paint I used up old Farrow & Ball house paint tins stored in the shed. The effect is halfway between a 'surface skin' and 'dye'. As soon as the soaking pigment dried, settling organically into cloud features directed by falling rain and evaporating dew of dawn, I knew I'd found my medium. This is what I'd been looking for, not aspiring to a pristine perfect aesthetic but re-connecting with my own Scottish Celtic agricultural heritage and falling in love with the raw, brutal, agricultural, unpolished, unsophisticated, and at times downright ugly. Next came the wire, not the rusty lethal Tetanus causing barbed-wire of my childhood, but sinew-like red iron dusted wire used to stabilise posts and nails. It is not the woman in me who creates, but the wandering child determined to bring muck and haps to life.
What interests me is visually articulating the worlds that reside in me and cavalcade in my dreams. After years of oil painting on stretched canvas wondering why the outcome was raw, brutal, agricultural, unpolished, unsophisticated, and at times downright ugly, I concluded it might be time to give up painting. I'm better with clay after all. Something in me fell apart on the canvas, revealing and concealing myself at once. Over fifty of my old painted stretched canvases painted in the 1990's and early 2000s live in storage. For years I've contemplated busting them up, rupturing and tearing them apart only to stitch them together in a Frankenstein sculpture. Finally I bought some raw canvas and started throwing paint at it, revelling in the dripping that Pollock must have experienced. It is addictive. Before painting I soaked the clean canvas in the canal hoping for some stains, hoping to invite Nature to meet me half way. Next, instead of using oil paint I used up old Farrow & Ball house paint tins stored in the shed. The effect is halfway between a 'surface skin' and 'dye'. As soon as the soaking pigment dried, settling organically into cloud features directed by falling rain and evaporating dew of dawn, I knew I'd found my medium. This is what I'd been looking for, not aspiring to a pristine perfect aesthetic but re-connecting with my own Scottish Celtic agricultural heritage and falling in love with the raw, brutal, agricultural, unpolished, unsophisticated, and at times downright ugly. Next came the wire, not the rusty lethal Tetanus causing barbed-wire of my childhood, but sinew-like red iron dusted wire used to stabilise posts and nails. It is not the woman in me who creates, but the wandering child determined to bring muck and haps to life.
Poetics of Failure I
Poetics of Failure I (2024) FRONT canvas, house paint, wire, rust, thread, leather, metal, plastic (300 x 180 cm) Rusting text reads: GARGANTUAN HEREDITARY STUBBORNNESS
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Poetics of Failure I as a project scrutinises the co-dependence of oil and war and the current wave of tech-billionaires obsession with colonising Space, proposing an intergenerational unchanging behaviour pattern in world leadership as gargantuan hereditary stubbornness. This series of installations draws attention to the direct link between the rise of the industrial revolution, mass consumerism that is historically deemed as the ‘golden age of oil’, the dependence upon oil for infantry warfare and the catastrophic casualties arising from poor fuel logistics, the interdependency of the financial markets on every aspect of oil excavation, storage, and distribution, and last but not least the locked in global dependency on oil as the major obstacle to an earnest transition to green and renewable fuels.
* the photos show the wire pre-rusting which will occur over the coming days and weeks and continue during the exhibition. |
BACK VIEW: GARGANTUAN HEREDITARY STUBBORNNESS
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Created outdoors by first submerging the raw canvas in canal water before applying house paint with various floor mops then stitching the text ‘gargantuan hereditary stubbornness’ by hand using rusty wire,* Poetics of Failure I (2024) is an outdoor hanging installation that will continue to rust, fade, and transform with the natural elements.** Beneath the suspended canvas are four pairs of men’s formal shoes (such as typically worn by office workers and political) painted in rust paint and soaked in red iron oxide then situated inside plastic bags onto which raindrops will drip, creating a natural sound installation.*** The leather straps are secured with wire and should hang approximately 30-60 cm from the ground, permitting room for the shoes and temporal rhythms of the rain drips. The artwork should be viewed from both sides and should not be touched. |
Venus Retrograde (2024)
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Venus Retrograde (2024) Inspired by Rothko's approach to the canvas as place this work (unfinished) expands my bi-handed drawing practice into wire and rust, a responsive medium both tactile and transitory. Venus Return, a term used in astrology and astronomy to indicate the illusory looping ellipse of a planet in reverse that is actually moving forward. Entangling the wire, piercing a cartography of illusory stations the constellation of a figure appears, Venus retrograde pauses, floats, emerges, moves both towards and away from the horizon. Weathered outside, the house paint mottles but does not mould, while the wire rusts, bleeds, scars the pigmented skin. The term 'planet' means 'wanderer'. To date no one truly knows where we come from or to where we will return. Tibetans believe the Bardo is our greatest teacher. Socrates believed the purpose of life was to prepare for a good death. The body's life is possibly only because of the fusion of bio-electric chemical currents and the breath. There is no single centre of control, not even the brain or heart, instead the body functions like its own cosmos complete with birthing and dying stars and galaxies. In every moment something holds us in place, our notions of self, or sense of place and space and relations, at the same time a turbulent material recycling takes place, renewing cells, senses, and pleasure. We are always rising and falling, stretching and tensing, giving and resisting, opening and closing, the preciseness of the action though is never this, it is the colour beige, the memory of blue, the taste of a rippling wave, the smell of a scar, and so on. This work is unfinished because like figure, I need to sit with the horizon, wait patiently, wait eternally, for nothing to emerge. |
Venus Retrograde (2024) Canvas, house paint, wire, rust, thread, 260 cm x 190 cm
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Prophecy of Future Extinctions (2023)
PROPHECY OF FUTURE EXTINCTION: Royal College of Art, CAP Studio Exhibition (Nov-Dec 2023)
Prophecy of Future Extinctions is a collective contemplation of the future of a species condemned to self-wrought annihilation.
Six artists juxtapose conceptual, philosophical and practical observations of extinction as a concentrated force of deliberate erasure, as they generate a site of ultimate anthropocenic aftermath.
In imagining the sabotage and decolonisation of established structures of power, tradition, and social order in a future far removed, the artists also consider the possibility that this age is approaching faster than humanity is willing to accept. Technology becomes a catalyst for entropy, as extinction transforms into a slow-release macroscopic ctrl+alt+delete.
Prophecy of Future Extinctions is a collective contemplation of the future of a species condemned to self-wrought annihilation.
Six artists juxtapose conceptual, philosophical and practical observations of extinction as a concentrated force of deliberate erasure, as they generate a site of ultimate anthropocenic aftermath.
In imagining the sabotage and decolonisation of established structures of power, tradition, and social order in a future far removed, the artists also consider the possibility that this age is approaching faster than humanity is willing to accept. Technology becomes a catalyst for entropy, as extinction transforms into a slow-release macroscopic ctrl+alt+delete.
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Drawing upon intuitive processes firmly rooted in ancient knowledge and ritual practice, these works materialise a fluid posthuman topography glimpsed via states of elevated consciousness. This exhibition ultimately invites the audience to soak in the possibilities of extinction and consider the future as a living, breathing site of resistance.Curator @athenamothership Artists: @lixinliart @chromosapiens @have_some_dignity @margot_wilson_art @haedonglee @athenamothership Photo @athenamothership
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Refuge I (2022): Jute Scrim and Horse Hair
One of my favourite moments was the assemblage of this artwork. It took less than an hour to emerge. No thread or fixings hold the fragile horse hair in place, only the resting binding embrace of the jute scrim held and moulded by the slabs of unfired earth. The Barbie horses in the corner are ever present in my life, reminding me of hazy and hail days trudging through mud to catch and ride wild ponies. With each rising of the sun somewhere in me is the glance of horse's hock stepping forth and an ear twitching, listening to tilted noise.
Premonitions (Various) (2023/24)
Refuge II (1998 & 2023) oil, on canvas (75 cm x 75 cm)
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Mothership (2023) Oil, Paper, Canvas Board 21 x 29 cm
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