Overlooked
In its finishing stages, I realised that all along, unnoticed by me, our show has a consistent and logical theme. While we worked, the components — paintings, wallpaper and mosaic — seemed more or less disparate. Wanting to create a sense of visual unity, I came up with formal correlates between one element and another (repetitions of size, scale and form) but these didn’t address the question of what the work itself was about.
In the studio Matt and I worried about the impossibility of what we were doing. What urgency or relevance could this collection of antiquated media have for a contemporary audience? Oil paintings – the words themselves have a laughably old-fashioned ring. Hand made wallpaper and mosaic – what world were we living in? But when the show was almost complete, we looked at our work and the combination of impossibilities suddenly seemed electric.
The paintings take on an outmoded form — the visual language of modernism. A formal grid is laid out, and within it, using tone, colour and transparency of hue, we aim to create a restless unsettled image. Based rigorously on a simple mathematical principle, the end-product ought to be predictable – but it isn’t. The eye struggles to find a placid configuration – but as soon as it seems to have been achieved, the arrangement jumps out of synch again. Our big coloured painting is called ‘The Unseen’ – a reference both to its impossible aestheticism – a taboo of today — and to its unstable quality. The wallpaper too is temporary, fragile and unstable.
‘Opus circumnactum’ as you may know, is the name given to a mosaic field design – arched fans used as a background for figurative images. It is a form designed to animate an image, but to be overlooked. We have printed ‘opus circumnactum’ patterns onto lining paper – a material usually designed to be laid beneath a more robust decorative finish. This theme of the overlooked, hidden and temporary is continued in the mosaic – traditionally an unauthored form.
The mosaic ‘Clay End’ – a title which comes from the division of labour in a ceramic factory — is made from medieval pottery sherds excavated from the grounds of a country house in Yorkshire. These sherds have languished unseen in boxes in an industrial estate on the outskirts of York since their discovery. Last year, in our exhibition ‘Five Sisters’ we showed a work, a temporary installation, made from these fragments. It has been given a short stay of execution allowing us to show some of it here. Like all the elements in this show, it addresses issues of pattern and labour through the perspective of the unseen, hidden and overlooked.
Oh, this makes me so happy
I wish I could come to the show. Post lots of pics, please.