Short Pieces on Contemporary Art

The World As Yet Unseen. Women Artists in Conversation with Partou Zia.

Image: Partou Zia, Green Breath, 2006, oil on canvas, 152x183 cms.

Paste the link below for the complete catalogue and essay by myself and by my co-curator, Clare Cooper of Art First, London - https://twayu.falculture.org/

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TREMENHEERE GALLERY. SEPTEMBER 7TH–OCTOBER 2ND 2019.

The Tree of Thought: ​The Art of Kate Walters



Kate Walters’ art speaks clearly. Yet because it is visceral, communicating to our bodies first, it can be easy to underestimate the quality of thought it embodies.

Embodied thought addresses the kind of understanding that bypasses spoken or written language because it is deeper. Precisely because it embodies rather than explains or narrates, it is not didactic; Walters never preaches.

There is, nonetheless, a powerful and consistent message. It concerns the big questions: what does it mean to be fully human; what is our place in the natural world; where are we going; questions that echo Gauguin’s great philosophical work, ​D’où venons-nous, Que sommes-nous, Où allons-nous? But, unlike Gauguin, the work does not so much pose questions as feel its way towards articulating the mysteriousness of being.

This is a Shamanic understanding of what many of the ancient religions variously call the Path or the Way – and Walters is a fully initiated Shaman. This is not a casual or loose similarity, but rather the long-term commitment that underpins her art.

So what is this Shamanic terrain? It is paradoxical, because it is fully aware, yet indirectly evoked. If you compare ​Child with Plant Wand​ and ​Buds with Babies,​ the eye-leaves of the first appear to be the seed-children of the second, who resemble the child holding the plant. These eyes suggest insight as much as sight, awareness and receptiveness to the cycle of rebirth, to movement out and movement in, like breathing.

It’s an effect that reminds me of what Maleno Barretto said of the intrepid Margaret Mee (both botanical artists), ‘She seems to be inside the plant’1. This suggests that art does not distinguish us from Nature, but rather is integral to it. Many of us who have known individual animals well understand the absurdity of the idea that they don’t think. It’s the result of projecting our ways of thinking onto creatures whose experience of the world is different.

But plants? There is increasing scientific evidence that plants, especially trees, do indeed think. The interdependence of trees, for example, is such that they form something very like a community. Theirs is a collectivity based on communication. It is extensive and applies to the entire tree: apparently their more widely known capacity to warn each other of insect attack through the release of hormones above ground, and to take defensive action, is complemented underground, partly through the intermediary of fungi. Fungi are neither plant nor animal, but a form of life in between.

Perhaps we might call this capacity to see into the life of things ‘Natural Intelligence’, not in opposition to ‘Artificial Intelligence’, but as a complement. ‘Human Intelligence’ is only one form.

Mee always worked entirely from living plants, usually in their natural setting and including their habitat, unlike conventional botanical illustrators. In this way, she shows that that they are integral to their environment, an inseparable part of it. To capture the enigmatic Moonflower (Selenicereus wittii), which blooms once and night and then dies, she balanced half the night astride a narrow canoe. She risked herself alone with nature in order to convey the living energy of an organism in its habitat. And it is a risk; like her, Walters risks herself. The result is demanding work that rewards the concentrated looking of open awareness.

Truly look at the works in this show and you will see that living energy, a life-force that unites everything that lives and breathes; for, as Simryn Gill, another artist admired by Walters, said, “If the botanical world falters, so do we.”3 Our ability to breathe has evolved in exact synergy with theirs. It is an understanding that demands action and restraint from harm, a thoughtfulness about balance and care. In this it is political; in Gill’s case, against colonial exploitation; in Walters’, in support of Extinction Rebellion (XR) and taking personal responsibility.

At the same time, the works are underpinned by a structural precision belied by their fluidity and softness. This aspect of the work is evidenced in the approaches of two other artists Walters admires, Christine Ödlund and David Thorpe. Both explore geometry and growth.

This sense of co-emergence is conveyed not only through form, but also through technique. There are four methods in this show: watercolour, monotype, spit bite etchings, or a combination; and oil. Take for example Kate’s three spit bite etchings: ​Breath of Plant or Horse;​ ​Horse with Child and Planet (see below)​; Mother Bird Feeds Human Infant.​ Perhaps the main characteristics of spit bite etchings are textural similarity of figure and ground and closeness in feel to watercolour. And yes, spit can be an ingredient, though not always. It seems completely appropriate here.

The image is not materially differentiated from its surround; it’s a matter of degree and, more subtly, of construction, as in the figure-ground instability of ​Seeing Tree or Storm (see above, at start),​ ​World Tree with Cocooned Infants​ and ​Untitled.​ Plant, tree, animal, bird and human life all materialise in these works in the gap that is ambiguity, all part of the same miraculous planetary process. The oils foreground the kinds of emergence to which the medium is so perfectly suited. Colour, marks (both ends of the brush) and a fragile symmetry create a textural and layered becoming in which the animals both support and merge into the human and plant forms, from birth to dissolution. From a distance, the palette and composition evoke C17th Dutch still life masters; ‘still’ life here meaning ‘always’, not ‘motionless’. They form a Tree of Thought.

For anyone who thinks they know more than this planetary tree, I offer this couplet from William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence:

The Bat that flits at close of Eve


Has left the Brain that won’t believe

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The Morphogenesis of Modernism: Stein and the Sexed Universal

Knockers, this timely new show from Lucy Stein serendipitously coincides with her inclusion in the Virginia Woolf-inspired group show at Tate St Ives. The Tate show deserves to prove a game-changer, since it subtly demonstrates the breadth and quality of art by women from the rise of Modernism to the present. It does this by using Woolf’s writing as a philosophical and thematic underpinning - and by leaving it to the viewer to realise that no art by men is represented. Both are highly instructive. Overall, the curation shifts how we understand the ground we thought we knew.

Stein’s role in the Tate show’s voyage of discovery is considerable. Let us take a look at this before taking up ideas about the curation of the Woolf show in greater detail.

Not only are Stein’s pieces powerful as presences, they connect many Twentieth Century painterly developments in ways that are rarely, if ever, fully acknowledged in the narratives of Modernism. There is a simultaneous exploration in her work of abstract expressionism at the same time as surrealism, myth and feminism, for example. This brings to attention that the whole show is also making new connections between innovation, traditions, movements and styles. It is a reinvention of painterly language. And it strongly challenges the usefulness of most of those “-isms” I’ve just used. Seen through the lens of this show, and after the gallery that you walk through to get to it, Modernism looks subtly different. The same goes for how it relates to the contemporary.

I like to call this overall process ”morphogenesis”, because it derives from material science, bringing together origin and form as dynamic: origin is always already in motion; form is indispensable to movement. Nothing is fixed; yet everything is related. In morphogenesis, relationality is a mass of changing tensions and releases; but it is grounded. This is a language, not of disembodied symbolism, but one that speaks the body.

It is essential to bear this embodied language in mind when approaching Stein’s latest work. What is behind the surface is in continuous conversation with what is on it.

Take Con Leche (2018) - the reference to esoteric symbolism (above) is clear enough. But you’d be mistaken to think its presence signifies you have arrived at either a starting-point or an end. Top right and, although similar shapes emerge, they are now more abstract, with the red and black ground thinning to grey and yellow. Between and below and behind the rest of the canvas, light blues cool the heat of what could become a vortex, were it not balanced by the rhythmic holding power of the central body, an outlined negative space whose forms converse with the symbols and the multiple layered surfaces. A similar, more diffuse mingling of bodies and landscape is extended yet further in Bee Cumming at Boscawen-Un (2016), where bodies are integrated into its mobile layering.

This common materiality of bodies and the natural world manifests again in Green Man Hanging (2018). While his foot is a point of attachment to the tree, it is also a way into and through it, and the branch to the left of the foot is like another foot. The man’s stance is impossible; the tree’s square framing growth equally so. The leaves, lines and marks of the dark area on the right suggest a seahorse or perhaps a dragon, uniting all forms as animate.

Yet this suggestion of commonality is not a merging. It never settles into a unified or decorative surface. An essential part of the lexicon in Stein’s recent work is the appearance of triangular shapes, often arranged in oblongs, as in Con Leche. What are they? the object of the goddess-like figure’s gaze, or a signal of something else?

These geometries are a constant reminder of other dimensions, as we also see in Celtic Ultrasound and Petrified Maidens. Originating in the tiles of 16th Century Valencia, and associated by Stein with spatial simplification, they act in number of ways as punctuation or rhythmic anchoring, or palette/palate cleansers. I might compare the effect of the river of milky tears, solidifying yet spectral, that participates in and stabilises Con Leche’s gorgeous dance. Yet none of these elements is ultimately explicable, and nor should they be. They remain mysterious disturbances, to trip the complacent.

Plunge into this exhilaration of potential energy, and any idea of a single meaning or direction seems irrelevant. We have moved through the esoteric to other places that invest the “now” with the vibrancy of all time and space. If that isn’t magic, then what is?

This is the territory of Bee Cumming at Boscawen-Un (2016), a painting that rewards different ways of looking (below). It invokes what Stein calls “a blissful embodied moment”, comparing it to the syncretic experience of blinking your eyes in the bright light of summer. Despite its ambiguities and smudginess, it is clear at a level that manifests if you go with its dedifferentiated vision and yield to the strange potency it conveys of ancient sites that connect to the greater forces of the cosmos. As with Agnes Martin, a good place to start is very close up, where peripheral vision becomes more important to seeing than it generally is in singular, directed focus.

Yet, interestingly, what Stein is thinking about when she paints is technical. Thinking about the different handling of paint while still working on Celtic Ultrasound (2018), Stein remarked that just then she was interested in the upper part where she had scraped paint from other paintings and worked it in with a palette knife, and then with bringing this together with the contrastingly limpid areas. Her interest was in ways of revealing how disparate surfaces could work together.

Perhaps it’s the technical approach of the alchemist, since it is focussed on the transformative potential of the material. These tiles, at the same as they work formally as described above, operate on the elemental level of intense, fiery heat, the firing of clay like the base metal in a crucible. Stein’s interest in embodiment extends to the materiality of painting, the interaction of the physicality of hand and pigment and support.

This is an example of the way Stein regards painting as a difficult process of problem solving, directed towards enabling the emergence of techniques, images or colours. It is not about conveying something that already exists, either in the interior or in the exterior world.

Perhaps it’s the technical approach of the alchemist, since it is focussed on the transformative potential of the material. These tiles, at the same as they work formally as described above, operate on the elemental level of intense, fiery heat, the firing of clay like the base metal in a crucible. Stein’s interest in embodiment extends to the materiality of painting, the interaction of the physicality of hand and pigment and support.

An aspect of this that I find fascinating is that she sees as symbolic the relations that emerge between materials and mark making, even (in Celtic Ultrasound) to the extent of responding to the cross struts of the stretcher behind the canvas as integral to the bones of the skeletal form under which it lies. It’s a subtle point, about the creation of an order of meaning somewhere between the Kristevan Imaginary and Symbolic - but without taking that theoretical frame too far.

This brings us to the reasons why I think this work signals the morphogenesis of Modernism into a way of painting broad enough to work with feminine and with the Subaltern. It is assimilation of a kind, but not passive incorporation into unchanged paradigm.

Understanding how female embodiment qualifies the paradigm of Modernism requires the metamorphosis of both - and it matters that the phrase is “female embodiment”, not the “the female body”. This difference inflects all aspects of how we understand the issues. The same goes for the broader idea of the Subaltern on which received Modernism to an extent depends.

Celtic Ultrasound, like all the works in this show, was made during Stein’s first pregnancy. While these paintings do not at all depend on pregnancy, this knowledge enables a great deal for the viewer. For among the shifts this work effects is that of how we understand the integrity of the pregnant body as a universal, not only as a particular of reproduction or any feminine essentialism, but rather as morphogenesis.

So in raising that fact that these works were made during pregnancy, it is vital that we do not assume they are about it. Rather, this awareness is a gateway to expanding our fragmented grasp of creative history to embrace our common humanity.

It was an indispensable part of the idealism of Modernism that it should aspire to the universal. This aspect of the long and multifaceted art of the last Century has been under sustained attack since the early 60s catapulted it into later phases, and in some respects rightly so. But the work then was to break open, to oppose, to counter culture.

That work is now more subtle and complex. It is no longer dualist or oppositional. What art is now doing is to reinvent connection while maintaining differentials. Figuration is not opposed to abstraction; mainstream is not opposed to alternative.

In this light, the universal cannot be the singular domain it once seemed to be. It has to be a multiplicity of both-ands, a thousand tiny sexes and thousand micro-subjectivities that yet interact and pass through each other. In this, we are all able to participate in a universal that is a meeting, a position through which we might pass, not one that can be occupied. Yet difference remains. It is a sexed universal.

So this is a universal that embraces embodiment in its essentials. The only symbol of that, as Luce Irigaray has suggested, is the navel, the mark of umbilical connection carried by us all, newborn to urban spaceman.

References

Elizabeth Grosz (1990/1994) ‘A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics’ in Boundas & Olkowski (eds) Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, Routledge. London/NY.

Julia Kristeva (1984) Revolution in Poetic Language. Columbia. NY.

Luce Irigaray (1980/1993) ‘Body against Body: In relation to the Mother’ in Sexes and Genealogies. Columbia. NY.

Penny Florence is Professor Emerita at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.

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Island Bodies

An essay to accompany an exhibition of recent work by Kate Walters at Newlyn Art Gallery, February 14th – April 18th 2019.

These recent works by Kate Walters stand on the cusp of change in her increasingly impressive oeuvre. Fascinatingly, they also position us on many thresholds, each of which works towards complex meanings: they are between worlds; between earthly beings; between beings and plants; between abstraction and figuration; between profound and ancient traditions and an innovative symbolism that extends them.

What I mean by this is that while she draws on traditions – the Shamanic, the Graeco-Roman – she never merely repeats them. So although she references Artemis/Diana (the huntress) we do not find a goddess figure accompanied by the usual trappings of hound, bow and arrow, and stag. Rather, Walters explores Diana’s rôle as guardian of the wild forest, protecting all newborns, without distinguishing between animal and human. In this, her wildness is associated with water, both as the free-flowing imagination and the untamed rivers and springs. This is not to preclude Diana’s lethal capacity as huntress; but rather to foreground that none of this is sentimental or easy. It is a matter of life and death.

The way Walters draws on the Shamanic helps to bring these thoughts of transition and the wild closer to the formal qualities of the painting. There are two elements in this tradition that she cites: the tree and hair. Several of the works in this exhibition articulate a co-emergence between branches and hair, and between both of these and veins or living sap, or the ducts through which nurturing milk flows. We see it in the forms and the way the paint flows and spreads. It is more than transitional: they are consanguineous.

So why ‘Island Bodies’? Because the works were inspired by islands, of course: Iona, Orkney, the Uists and Shetland. But it goes further than that. An island is not the opposite of the mainland; it’s as connected as all parts of the earth are. It’s just that we can’t see it under the waters, nor can we see that the waters are what define all life.

We have to think and see differently to understand these things, these works of art. We have to be “Deep in the Psyche of Nature”.

As Walters points out, quoting her favourite Rilke:

The moon won’t use the door,

Only the window.