Blog Posts

Unspeakable Things

15/11/2015

I was in the mind-set before Friday's news of the Paris attacks began to break, worrying about an old friend who has to say goodbye to his comatose, dying sister, and wants to know what he should say (this is more important to him than whether she can hear him or not). Then came the news of all those loved ones who will never go home, where no last words can be spoken because that opportunity has been suddenly and violently taken away.

I spent the best part of a year recently, working on MAP OF THE WORLD, responding to those early modern altar pieces showing Earth, Heaven and Hell in glorious detail. The lowest tier of my piece deals with hellish subject matter. Some images show the private hells of unhappiness and addiction but it is pictures of ideological atrocities that dominate. These include a topical portrait of Jihadi John, alongside the neatly stacked skulls of the Killing Fields, torture scenes at Abu Ghraib and the train tracks into Auschwitz. Hovering in the sky between skulls and poppy is a newly invented hybrid character made up from the symbols of all major religions. I include them in hell because, whatever the good and moral intentions of organised faiths in theory, their practice has unleashed many of our most unspeakable actions as human beings.

MAP OF THE WORLD

Detail MAP OF THE WORLD

Detail MAP OF THE WORLD oil, clay and gold leaf on wood 2014-2015

A Definite Space

30/9/2015

SWALLOW'S NET, Indian ink on Japanese paper, 50x70cm, Sirett, 2015

This summer's exhibition of Joseph Cornell's shadow boxes at The Royal Academy was a testament to the delights of a box. I've rarely heard so many visitors at an exhibition exclaiming, even laughing out loud as they explored the floors and walls, niches and ceilings of these spaces. Usually viewers at exhibitions of 'great art' are more silent, focussed on printed, audio and the occasional human guide. I wondered why it was people felt able to comment so playfully and freely. Is it something in a box’s form, its openings, closings, conceals and reveals; in the drama of its narratives from Pandora’s Box and Portia’s caskets to hidden treasures and The Box of Delights?

A colleague of mine once told me that she collected boxes almost obsessively for several years. One night, looking at these empty containers cluttering her already crowded home, she concluded that she was trying to buy space!

Whatever the reason I have always loved boxes and making artworks with them only increases that fascination. I've blogged in the past about the fantastic narrative possibilities in a box, where the many faces offer a natural framework for a series of images. Recently, I've started thinking about those surfaces unfolded, flattened out into their net designs and have begun a series of BOXED BIRDS, exploring a process of wrapping a bird around the net, inside and out and the pleasures of working inside and outside the box continues!

Untitled, Joseph Cornell, 1936

PELICAN'S NET, Indian ink on Japanese paper, 50x70cm, Sirett, 2015

The Two Faces of Eve

8/5/2015

“Being a good girl, a perfect girl, can kill you fast or it can kill you slow, flattening everything precious inside you, the best dreams of your one life into drab homogeneity.”
Laurie Penny UNSPEAKABLE THINGS 2014

ST URSULA WITH HER VIRGINS RijksMuseum, Amsterdam

I've been working lately on a new series of works: CAUTIONARY TALES, looking at some of the many perils of being female. In the process I have become more and more aware of the stories that we tell girls about girls and of current issues facing young women.

In many ways it's easy to assume that a girl growing up in the UK today is relatively free from the social constraints. Equal Rights are accepted (at least in theory). We are a liberal and increasingly secular society. Girls have unprecedented freedom to make their own sexual choices. Yet online bullying and judgement of women in the public eye consistently labels them as sluts, as 'unfuckable' and/or threatens them with sexual violence. It is extraordinary that in the 21st Century we are still discussing women in terms of how their bodies are used by others, but that old notion of the woman's body as object has not gone away.
Objectification is a girl's adolescent rite of passage. Mine began in the 1970s. I was a 'slag', an 'ice queen', 'frigid' or 'gagging for it'. All labels assigned according to the judgement of others. I really did think it would be different for my daughter, but some things are slow to change.

Laurie Penny, who experienced acute anorexia as a teenager and survived to write brilliant, excoriating polemics, is my favourite new wave feminist. Penny highlights a prevailing experience of the body as split. Split between the unacceptable body that we have and the body that we ought to have and would have, if we weren't so shamefully ill-disciplined, such poor excuses for womankind. Goodness knows what percentage of national GDP is spent unquestioningly on products that promise without irony to perfect, to transform, to defy age. Each purchase, an investment in the story of our unacceptability while incidents of self harm, eating disorder and body-dismorphia are on the rise.

On a recent trip to Belgium and Holland I saw a lot of medieval virgins, effigies of women without sin. Mary, mother of Jesus and breastfeeding virgin was everywhere. We are centuries from mass cults of virginity but is this impossible-to-achieve notion of untouched womanhood, still lurking in the shadows? Is this the double-bind, that makes us so accepting of our unacceptability? Doubtless, it's more complicated than that, but I am trying to be aware of object-judgement, whether it's out in society or inside my head and to beware of splitting in two, of separating what we are from what should be. It's a political decision. It's not just little girls who need different stories.

Are we post-post modern yet? It's been a while and I'm starting to get bored.

19/2/2015

HERO, LEADER, GOD, Alexander Kosolapov

'Hoover Breakdown' (1979) Bill Woodrow '

..something in my experience was missing. This celebration of commodity, these pastiches of cultural objects, felt both superficial and slight.

Postmodernism and its rejection of the idea of the art work as an original and unique creation was well established by the time I arrived at art school in the 1980s. Games were and are still being played with the notion of artwork as a reproducible object, just like any other consumer durable. In an era of mass production, nothing is unique, so post-modern art parades 'its own superficiality and derivativeness'. * The notion of art as the authentic production of an individual imagination was and remains thoroughly marginalised.

Now I enjoy a bit of of knowing post-modern irony as much as the next woman. I loved encountering Kosolapov's Lenin, Jesus and Mickey Mouse at 'POST POP: EAST MEETS WEST at the Saatchi Gallery last week, appreciating its cultural and political satire, the references to classical and soviet era sculpture...etc. There was pleasure too in the deconstructed components of Bill Woodrow's Hoover, a pleasing elegance in their arrangement, their functionality and their age. Yet, for all this, something in my experience was missing. This celebration of commodity and pastiche's of cultural objects, felt both superficial and slight. Besides a fleeting enjoyment of their craftsmanship and wit, there is little lasting impact. My experience was, in best postmodernist style, disposable.

My problem is that I long for something more. Every time I read a book, watch a film, visit a gallery; I am looking for authentic experience. I want insight; I am even open to be changed. The trouble with clever, contemporary conceptual art (ifice) is that it rarely offers experiences, which mean anything in any depth. It seems to me that this must be because, after decades of rejection of the notion of art made from a unique original perspective, there is a fear of subjective expressions of experience. Imagination is taboo, concept and reason rule.

Postmodernists might well assert that their arch parodies, nihilism and pastiche subvert and shock society. I am not sure how true this is. As Richard Kearney observes,’ groundbreaking' art is often rapidly assimilated into the mainstream. 'Even the most dissident imaginations appear to be swallowed into the ideology of the simulacrum which prevails in our consumer age'.

* Quotations from THE WAKE OF IMAGINATION Richard Kearney 1988

Heart and Soul and Chemical Highs

9/12/2014

INNENRAUM, Anselm Kiefer, oil acrylic and paper on canvas,1981

To my mind's eye, Kiefer's work has what I am seeking: heart, soul and authenticity.

ASCHENBLUME , Anselm Kiefer, oil, emulsion, acrylic, earth, clay, ash, wire and sunflower 1983-1997

It's been a while since I have had an experience of heartfelt inspiration in a gallery but this autumn's major Anselm Kiefer retrospective at the Royal Academy most definitely hit the spot. Kiefer's is one of several current shows that are a celebration of the glorious possibilities of paint. I had fully expected that it would be Rembrandt's Late Works, at the National Gallery, that would provide me with that heart-stopping high. Rembrandt's buttery, sculpted impasto and dark translucent shadows have always stopped me in my tracks but this time it was Kiefer who had the greater and most enthralling impact.
My favourite series of works on show at the R.A. are the huge paintings of Nazi-Era architecture. Kiefer, often spending several years on individual canvases, manages to evoke the crumbling of an entire empire. These are vast monuments to hubris and decay, made in oil, emulsion and acrylic, ash, earth and clay. They are an exquisite expression of the weight of history on the German psyche.They take my breath away.

Detail: THE JEWISH BRIDE, Rembrandt van Rijn, oil on canvas 1667

BRAINSTORM, Natalie Sirett, oil on wood, 2014

As part of the research and development process for a new artwork, THE MIND MANAGEMENT CLOSET, I have recently been reading about Neuroscience, specifically the field of Neuroaesthetics which explores what happens in the brain when we view an artwork that inspires. It is now established that a pleasurable reward occurs in the form of a chemical change. In his book, The Splendours and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness (John Wiley and Sons Ltd, 2008), Neuroscientist Semir Zeki. connects this change with a subjective experience of perfection that both viewer and artist are seeking.

It doesn't surprise me that a chemical change is involved. When I describe my viewer's response to Keifer, the language I use is about physical sensation: heartfelt, breathtaking, heart stopping... At a certain moment when I am making a new work, I become infatuated with it, I am drunk on its possibility, my heart races, I am on a high. Then there is the real downer when I start to see it as just something else I made. Semir Zeki cites Lucien Freud on this subject. "A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation and disappears towards the completion of the work...Were it not for this, the perfect painting might be painted, on the completion of which the painter could retire. It is this great unsufficiency that drives him on...The process is habit forming."

Art appreciation is subjective; as the saying goes, we all 'know what we like', but what is it exactly that we know?

Any artist reading the less than glowing reviews for Maggi Hambling's show, also at the National Gallery, will have winced at the viciousness of some critics. Hambling drew accusations of what many of us fear the most: inauthenticity, expressed (in the case of Jonathan Jones), in some of the most furious language I have ever read from a critic. I am yet to see the show, but I know that my experience of it cannot be identical to Mr Jones' because that's not how it works.

It has been an interesting first year as a blogger. Articulating and sharing my experiences as both artist and viewer is sharpening my thinking. Here's hoping that we all have many heartfelt highs in 2015.

Glasgow, Joinery & a Vision of Hell

12/10/2014

I have just spent a few days in the handsome city of Glasgow, with its stone tenements, good people and vistas of mountains - even from the city centre. I spent most of my time exploring the university's Stirling Maxwell Collection* of early printed books, manuscripts and emblem books, finding intriguing images or series' of images that cannot be fully 'read' /understood without their accompanying text. I love the many nature-related maxims: a crab with the world on its back is accompanied by the text "Sic Orbis Iter" - The Way of the World. Text and image combined suggest that it is the nature of the world to go backwards.
*Although did see an amazing Hamlet at the Citizens Theatre.

In London the work on my own image series' continues. Moving on from DeTOXIFY-ME, I wanted to continue joining pictures into story using some kind of object rather than a flat canvas as my starting point. Working on wooden boxes in the Detoxify series flagged up several advantages. A box opens and closes like a book and offers a continuous series of surfaces that can be walked around as a story is told. After spending many a long hour looking at junk shops and e-bay curiosities, I hit on the idea of using printers' trays, those drawers used to store printing blocks, and discovered that these fabulous constructions offer all kinds of narrative potential. I am now busily, building trap doors between images, breaking down walls to connect them, erecting new walls to separate them and chiseling the occasional tunnel. There is so much potential for storytelling in the opening, closing, echoing and mirroring of one image with another. I am thinking of it as a new kind of joinery and have begun to make an atheist vision of EARTH, HEAVEN AND HELL.

This piece (pictured), is very much a work in progress. I had expected that traditional symbolism would play a larger role than is (at least currently), the case. There is a pomegranate with Persephone’s six seeds, but this Hell is peopled with documented and familiar images of modern humanity: the young girls gang-raped and hung in India, the train tracks to the gates of Auschwitz, James Foley kneeling in the desert, torturers at Abu Ghraib, Pol Pot’s store of skulls.... There are images of addiction too: a figure drowns in a sea of bottles, the heroin poppy and the syringe...

EARTH, HEAVEN & HELL In Progress 32"x42" 2014

HELL (in Progress) oil and gold leaf on wood 32"x14" 2014

It's an experience to carefully gild a swastika and paint the faces of murdered children. On the whole I am looking forward to moving up to Earth!

So I am engaged in a massive investigation of Good and Evil. It's an epic undertaking. As is so often the case, I recently read something that explains exactly how this feels. In the dedication of East of Eden (another epic on the same subject), John Steinbeck offers the novel to his publisher, describing it as a box.

“Everything I have is in it...Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good and bad and evil thoughts – the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation… And still the box is not full.”

Which brings us neatly back to boxes.

Black on White

15/7/2014

Orson Welles as Harry Lime in THE THIRD MAN (Carol Reed 1949) .

When Renee Rilexie, curator of EVOCATIVE at The Menier Gallery, asked contributing artists to explain what the word evocative meant to them, this was the image that instantly sprang to my mind. A still shot from the classic Film Noir The Third Man, where a beam of light briefly illuminates a man's face and the key plot twist is revealed. The Third Man is the greatest ever Film Noir. I should say 'arguably the best' but I don't believe there is a case to be argued.This film is a breathtaking piece of cinematography for which Robert Krasker won the Academy Award. In terms of story, character, score and production it is an extraordinary play of light and dark.

The fact that the word evocative brought a black and white image to mind, led me to wonder what changes in our perceptions when colour is absent. Monochrome commands very specific responses. Perhaps the most obvious of these, since technicolour processes and colour photography were rare and expensive before the mid-20th century, is an evocation of nostalgia. Old family photographs and flickering newsreels cannot fail to suggest past times. However, monochrome is not simply the soft-focus and vintage charm of a bygone era. Stripped of colour: line, tone, form and composition become somehow more individually substantial. It is as if the simplicity of black and white offers an articulacy that a 'full-colour' experience lacks. Perhaps this is why terms such as 'classic', 'minimal' or 'sophisticated' are often associated with black and white photography.

From Alice in Wonderland Illustrator: John Tenniel

Edward Gorey

“When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls.”

― Ted Grant

From The Wolves of Willoughby Chase Illustrator: Pauline Baynes

I have always loved the experience of putting black ink to paper. I love the dynamism of the graphic line, the way it instantly animates the empty paper's surface. Without question this love affair stems back to childhood and the illustrations of Pauline Baynes, Pat Marriott, Edward Gorey, Boz and Phiz. I spent many a long hour tracing comic strips and characters from Beryl the Peril to Snoopy.

It wasn't until I began to draw with pen, sometime in my mid-teens, that I felt even slightly in charge of the act of drawing. I think this is largely because pen can't be rubbed out and so, instead of endlessly correcting and adjusting my greyish pencil studies, I had to be decisive. Every mark I made was there to stay, I had to make them work.

The virtue of pen or brush and ink is that they produce such direct images. Small wonder they are still favoured by cartoonists and graphic novelists. Paul Klee famously said that a drawing is "simply a line going for a walk", as if it is the line and not the artist who is in charge. On a good day, I find that my pen lines do seem to do exactly what they want.and find I am drawing with an assurance that is not entirely mine. Perhaps it is the will power of the line?

Paul Klee: Lines, Dots and Circles

From Art Spiegelman's graphic novel MAUS

Ironically, the artwork I am showing in the EVOCATIVE show this August is very colourful. However, I am also leading a workshop on drawing with pen and ink. Admission is free, materials provided, and all ages are welcome. For those who cannot make August 23rd, here are a couple of trade secrets that I will be sharing on the day:
1.The black and white choice you face is to make the mark, or leave a space. Blank areas are
every bit as active as drawn, so be aware of their shape.
2. Doodle at all times. It is very important, whatever your teachers told you.

Told largely in Pictures

7/6/2014

I have recently finished the series of diptychs: DETOXIFY-ME, using egg tempera for the first time and recording the work in progress.
To make the exterior of the fourth diptych: THE CURE FOR MADNESS, I wanted to set a medallion-style copy of Bosch's "Stone of Folly" on a faux-leather background.

I began by coating a poplar box with several layers of gesso (whiting and rabbit skin glue), sanding each layer smooth.

To establish the main tonal changes in Bosch's painting, I mixed Indian ink washes of various strengths and blocked out the design.

To create the faux leather effect. I overlaid layers of darker colour with light. In the process, I learned that tempera is much stickier than oil paint, it dries unexpectedly.

While lighter layers were still wet, I blotted them with crumpled tissue paper and scrunched up carrier bags.

I usually use ready mixed paint from tubes so mixing up raw pigment from scratch was an adventure. This lovely pigment is green earth.

It's a pressure trying to do justice to Bosch. I made concerted efforts, but struggled to get tempera's famed 'jewel-like' effect. I gilded the frame around the medallion with yellow-gold leaf.

In the end I decided that Hieronymous would have to settle for a textured and less than jewel-like tribute.To seal the box, I sprayed the surface with fixative and added a thin, temporary varnish.

As ever with a new medium, I felt simultaneously frustrated by my lack of mastery and excited by the different ways tempera behaves. When making the exterior of the second box, SHOCK THERAPY, I began to play around with scratching into the gesso surface with an old school compass, creating a faux-snakeskin texture, then washing semi-transparent colour into the grooves. I will definitely be using this medium again.

Created In Code

29/4/2014

"Genesis" from UTRIUS QUE COSMI Robert Fludd. 1617

"The science of alchymy I like very well, and indeed,...not only for the profits it brings in melting metals, in decocting, preparing, extracting and distilling herbs, roots; I like it also for the sake of the allegory and secret signification, which is exceedingly fine," TISCHREDEN Martin Luther 1566

There is a stage in a child's emergence as a writer when no separation is made between writing and drawing. When drawing is writing (and vice versa), letter and number-like forms are scattered among other marks representing parents, planets, vehicles, rainbows, superheroes; the things that mean the most in that individual child's world. Very young children may have little to say about a drawing once it is finished but speak to them while they draw and they will tell long, involved stories that reveal how meaningful these apparently random marks are. Usually around the age of four, an awareness of the differences between letter and image develops. At this point, the education system starts to focus hard on literacy skills; referring to writing as the capacity to encode. Sometimes I feel that it is at this moment, when image and alphabetic code separates, that we may be missing a trick. Children spend many subsequent years learning the correct rules of language and number systems and often become disconnected from explaining themselves in images altogether.

Recently I have been looking at an old coded system: alchemy. The word alchemist conjures images of hapless men in dungeon laboratories trying to turn dirt into gold, but, although a controversial practice, alchemy was practiced seriously in England between the 12th and 18th Centuries. The alchemist experimented on 'base' materials, putting them through various chemical processes, heating, cooling, distillation etc and observing how their properties changed as a result. Where their work differs from modern science is that symbolic images and ideas were also attached to the process. On a material level the aim was to transform 'base' matter into gold but there were loftier aims: the philosophers stone, the elixir of life...

Alchemical texts of the medieval period are rich in visual and symbolic imagery. Every element in the process, or 'magnum opus', has myriad identities. The glass vessels, used to contain the matter, might be known as the coffin, grave, ship, womb, nest, bed or garden, depending on what chemical process was occurring within it. Alchemists investigated 'divine' geometry and astronomy, linking their work to religious and magical traditions, colour coding the progress of refinement from base to gold was colour coded: black becomes white, white becomes green, green becomes red. Red, the 'rubedo', is the colour that represents the ideal state: often depicted as a red lion, king, or rose.

Glass containers or 'retorts' used in Alchemy.

By far the most striking alchemical texts, from a visual perspective are the works of English alchemist, cosmologist and mathematician Robert Fludd (1574-1637). It is surprising that Fludd's diagrams are not better known because they are certainly works of art. And, for those of us who still explain themselves in images, they are a feast of ideas.

ALCHEMICAL PLANETS, Gold Leaf, ink, Gouache & Clay on Wood Panels, Natalie Sirett, 2014

Work in progress .DeTOXIFY ME: White Green & Red ~ Portable Diptych, gold leaf & mixed media on wood

DETOXIFY ME:The Miraculous Efficacy of Images (& Plants)

16/3/2014

DeTOXIFY ME ~ Portable Diptych, gold leaf, gouache, ink & red clay on Poplar, 2014

detoxify / diːtɒksɪfʌɪ,

1. become free of toxic substances;
2. remove toxic substances from;
3. abstain or help to abstain from substances until the blood is free of toxins;

A time traveller arriving in 2014 might be forgiven for thinking we are suffering from an epidemic of toxicity. The subject is ubiquitous. There are toxins in the food chain, in the air, the water and the earth. Financial institutions collapse under the weight of 'toxic' assets, new species of specialists, including 'Happiness Counsellors' (I kid you not), proliferate, offering tips on diagnoses of toxic relationships and how to manage one’s own toxic thoughts. Our visitor soon knows the truth: we spoil and contaminate the planet and ourselves. Yet in the midst of this calamity, there is also a strong desire to remedy the situation; antidotes are discussed with almost as much enthusiasm as toxins.

Contemporary antidotes or 'detox' recipes invariably involve a return to a balance and a wisdom that has been lost; a return to nature. I find this desire to detoxify intriguing. It seems to suggest a belief that purity is attainable; that, if we succeed in detoxification, we will achieve a destined state of grace.

All this got be thinking about Medieval Diptychs. I can't help it, it's the way my mind works.

The Wilton Diptych (c. 1395–1399)

The Wilton Diptych in the National Gallery, London, is a small portable altarpiece, hinged like a book. Such objects were commissioned by pilgrims (in this case Richard II of England), for use when a traveller was caught between churches and needed to pray. Kneeling in worship before these images brought the pilgrim closer to redemption, to the cleansing of his soul, deliverance from evil and other detoxifying functions. At this time, when the universe was seen as animate, strong beliefs also existed about the power of Nature. The first anemone of the spring was wrapped in silk and worn as an amulet to ward off pestilence, while carrying a musk soaked acorn apparently guaranteed the attentions of the opposite sex.

The exterior is covered with a seaweed wrap. This 21st Century spa treatment involves being smeared in seaweed paste and wrapped in Clingfilm; the seaweed acting to draw fluid from skin cells 'detoxifying' the skin. Perhaps more significantly, in an era where slenderness is equated with triumph over temptation, is that iodine in seaweed causes the metabolism to speed up, thus breaking down fatty deposits. It is claimed that inches can be lost from thighs and tummies, an aspiration shared devoutly by many in the developed world.

Fascinated, as ever, by patterns and parallels between contemporary and historic longings , I have made a portable diptych,
DeToxify Me.

Inside the diptych, the left hand panel continues with contemporary imagery: an emaciated woman is nestled on a bed of 'super' foods: blueberries and curly kale. Above her head are raspberries, source of the latest miraculous slimming foods, raspberry 'keytones' and sprigs of St John's Wort, a remedy for depression.

The right hand panel shows a posy of flowers, seen historically as beneficial: an orchid to increase libido, milk thistles and dandelion for improved digestive function and the anemone to ward off plague. Above is a cloud of scarlet pimpernels, believed to cure melancholy when infused with hot water.