Hell in the studio
Working with Matt today, who feels he needs answers to some questions about our paintings. Not sure if the answers are for him, or for the potential viewing public, but in any case, here they are.
Matt: What are the paintings of?
Emma: The paintings are not of anything, but they are about something: perception. They take a simple format — a geometrical grid, and attempt to produce a credible, but metaphorical space within the grid. Ultimately I suppose the idea is that the painting is ‘like’ the effects of light — although that sounds so general an investigation that it is hard to make much of it. I don’t feel satisfied until the space seems to shift in a number of different ways. Standing in front of a painting, the experience should be almost queasy. Sometimes you read some configurations, sometimes others. And however mutable these readings may be, the painting as a whole must maintain visual coherence.
Matt: How can anyone tell if they are good or not?
Emma: It is impossible to predict what other people will think. It is essential to work not for others, but for yourself. The paintings are quite ambitious, and so they probably won’t all be equally good. I don’t think I have ever been to anyone’s show where I felt all the work was of even quality, and there is no artist in history whose work is all on the same level. Our work explores issues that might be resolved more effectively in one painting than another.
Matt: Why do two people do them?
Emma: It is an accident of our history. One person could make them. Or ten people could.
Matt: Why aren’t they carpets or silkscreen prints or something executed using modern methods, such as a computer?
Emma: I think they could be fantastic as carpets, although I think they would be expensive, as they are all about minute tonal transitions and relationships of surface that would have to be overseen in the making. On the other hand, I do think they are objects of contemplation, so they would probably be carpets for the wall. They could be silkscreens, if either of us understood the technology. They could certainly be mosaics, but our working relationship might make that difficult. They could perhaps be mosaics made by Franz Mayer, or Steven Miotto (the kings of the mosaic fabricators). I think our marriage could survive that. As to the computer, neither of us understand the technology of it well enough to make anything with it meaningfully. Perhaps we will eventually.
Matt: Why are some white and some coloured?
Emma: As far as we are concerned, for the task we are involved in, white works as a colour. The difference is really the brilliance of the hue. But for us, the colour is not the issue, the enquiry is the issue.
Matt: Why do this type of art now?
Emma: What do you mean by this question?
Matt: It doesn’t seem to be a current mode. It’s abstract, but it isn’t about meaning. So why should anyone care less about it? It doesn’t seem serious enough.
Emma: It is true that you can’t immediately read the meaning off the work, in the way that you could understand that a skull covered in diamonds might be dealing with issues of money and death, or that gnomes shitting chocolate might be about the body and abjection. This isn’t work ‘about’ triangles. But on the other hand, Damian Hirst’s spot paintings aren’t ‘about’ spots. I don’t deny it is limited in its focus, but as I have said before, you can’t focus on everything. an investigation evolves. Sometimes you only really understand what is revealed in what you have done, after you have done it.
We had a show earlier this year in York. It was important to make the work, which consisted of a mosaic comprised of medieval pottery sherds, and our paintings, which related to the medieval cathedral window ‘Five Sisters’ coherent as a combined statement. In the process of making, we noticed something about our work we had never spotted before. I have been talking about just this issue to the mosaic artist and writer Jennifer Blakebrough-Raeburn this week, for a piece she is writing about our show, for Mosaic Art Now.
I explained to her that the Five Sisters window was originally both geometrical and symmetrical. The message it conveyed was one of order, of God’s plan. But through the damage and subsequent repairs to the window, a different message was conveyed. The original order vanished, but a new form of organisation emerged. The beautiful haphazard quality of the way in which the light penetrates — seems a perfect analogy for the new structures of modernism. There is a role for chance. I think people generally understand that today, both in a visual and psychological sense. The order offered by a single fixed perspective seems to have limitations. Nothing is permanent, everything changes. The works in our exhibition ‘Five Sisters’ became a metaphor for change and renewal. Their subjectivity, the scope they have for a multitude of readings, makes them an authentic expression of our cultural moment.
And that’s enough for now. Picture of ‘Melchior’ in studio below:
In awe. Speechless. Must reread many times.