Paper for Both Ends of Madness @plasticP1

This is the paper I will be presenting to the symposium at Both Ends of Madness tomorrow:

It is a discussion of my approach to my painting She Walks Slowly into the Leith without a Boatman to guide Her

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Phoenix Egg

Lost Girl

My work usually starts with a narrative and through the process of creating a single work, or a series of works that narrative is distilled.  So what happens when the narrative is disappearing?  When the central character of the story is experiencing a process of disintegration?  There is a risk in that  becoming the narrative itself. A risk I have explored here and am still exploring in what is turning out to be a new series.

What are the Lost Stories of Oblivion and Remembrance?

There are characters to introduce, Padma, my mother in law who is 92, and has a life experience that crossed oceans and continents both literally and symbolically, a child of Sri Lanka then Ceylon, in the British Empire.  She was educated at a time when schools operated a sort of religious hierarchy, in a form of systemised discrimination.  She learnt, as a result to rebel internally, and adopted schemas which meant all her life until recently she has managed the duality of external conformity combined with a strong internal resistance.  She first came to Britain in the 1950s as a nurse in a TB isolation hospital and had great adventures some of which she still remembers.  She later came to Scotland to follow her husband’s career and training in Perth, crossing the Leith in Edinburgh, as a dependent wife and mother, a period that now draws a blank.

And then, there is Mark Rothko, (my sometime teenage goth crush), who created colourfields, and interestingly to me, set out to create a feeling of closing in.  I saw these works for the first time when I was seventeen, and broken and lost in the heart of my first experience of grief.  For me the Seagram images were absorbing, and gave me a sense of sinking into the dark space created by them, a chance to peacefully hold grief in my hands and examine it.  

Rothko was also influenced by Jung, a wise old Grandad with a bit part... and the way in which mythology provides us with archetypes for understanding.  And that is where I have gone for the landscape and symbolic content of the painting.  The River Lethe (spelt Leith here to reference Scotland and Padma’s tendencies to sit in the eddies of memories which confirm her independence).  A tributary of the river Styx, where swallowing the water was said to wash away memories.

Plastic Propaganda turned out to be a character in this story too.  Working with indigo pigment in preparation for Sugar and Spice I was drawn to starting works with raw pigment as a way of pulling together my painting and object making which tends to start with repurposed objects, repurposed objects which have a symbolic meaning either in their original form or through the process of intervention, so referenceing Beuys rather  than Duchamp .  So why not repurpose pigments?  A pigment which has an intimate symbiosis with  intercontinental relationships and the history of Colonialism, in particular with India, the Bengal Indigo rebellion and its role in the independence movement that in turn allowed Sri Lanka a more peaceful exit.  

While playing with the indigo I discovered its variability in texture and tone when mixed with various oil painting media.  I did attempt rabbit skin glue, like Rothko,  but found the pigment clumped and formed unsatisfying surfaces.  

The indigo dissolved more evenly in oil painting media with a lot of help from a pestle and mortar. The process of using the indigo has been to build pull back and rebuild surfaces to create that space at the same time as allowing for the introduction of symbolic iconography including in the media itself.  The surfaces have variations in the media used for application, but in this piece unlike other works I have created using indigo, the final varnish is uniform to create a sense of looking through a single plain, in a way creating a separation from the events happening, a framing of ourselves as viewers.

  So when I started to create this work, to try to gain an understanding of what Padma was experiencing, and to create a space for my own grief I wanted to create dark spaces where you might wander and be lost.  To create a river Lethe where it is possible to wander endlessly in half formed memories, and the absence of a guide for her so that rather than reaching the other side by gliding over the surface  in a boat and letting the waters settle behind her, she is lost in the vastness of it all.

In Padma’s dementia there are moments, sometimes days of lucidity, and these often correspond with a rationally expressed wish to die.  This is the light in the painting originating in what is left of her shadowy brain in the mists.  And eventually that will be the ending of this story, for now though, she still wanders and we still experience the slow grief that the family fell for someone who is both here and not.

“Give me the waters of the Lethe that numb the heart, if they exist I will still not have the power to forget you.” Ovid