This website is home to all my hops and steps. An exploration of landscape and queerness. Not mutaully exclusive. works
In my recent pieces I've been working through what I like to consider as 3 'modes' of direction, all interconnected, though discrete. It is my intention to navigate these 3 modes as a model of understanding in my practice, instead than say, the historical division between realism and abstraction. Rather, choosing to believe both of those traditional means can be employed through each mode as a conduit between each other to further realise an experience of the space and ideas one wishes to be explored through it.
The 3 modes are as follows; The physical, as in the material landscape that is explicitly and tangibly observable, existent beyond our viewership. the memory, the recollection of the image, essence or mythologies of the material. And the imagined, an unreal space, a metaphysical allusion, capable of consistent change and new observation that is not necessarily dictated by any rules of the material, though may abide by them reflective of our experiences and knowledge.
In interrogating the means of how these modes may be expressed in actual works, it may be an immediate assumption that the 3 modes parallel a scale from "realism" to the "abstract". I broadly oppose this idea and argue for a more transient approach, seeking instead to imply either-or (and everything other) between each mode to either create a cohesion between the three or as a further means of distinguishment. A work of realism may utilise the abstract, even the unreal, to enhance the material reality. Or as often seen, realism may be used to ground the imagined.
I hope to explore further these potential intersections between each mode to further establish how it may be used to construct my work but also to navigate other works of landscape.
My relationship to Jarman's work is inverted to most, I had only very recently learnt of him through his home (prospect cottage) and yet my exposure to him turned out to be much earlier. Discovering that his prospect residence was in Dungeness I was stunned to realise I had seen it before. Visiting with my dad whose means were lost on me at the time, "some artists lived here" was his reason for taking us. I remember the shacks and sculpture that littered the landscape and the black figure of the light house we climbed to view it from. A baron landscape suited for retrospect and escape. My most stubborn memory of the place, and one of the few things not mentioned in the show, was the dull, constant hum of the remaining active nuclear reactor. An indomitable backdrop against the desert, its vibration seemingly inescapable. Seeing now at the Gus Fisher gallery my first exposure to his paintings, video and written works, these memories excited me once again, as if Jarman was a presence I had never not known.
Yet, my initial impression of his work was: I did not like it. It was ugly and crass, naive even, in its violent, uncontrolled energy. I wince to think back on those feelings now. Jarman's later works, as seen in this exhibition, may seem confusing from afar, but pinned alongside them, we are too given his lived experience and far-too-early exit, documented by his poetry and loved one's photography. Understanding the anger and passion that would have overcome him in his last days, knowing his vision was failing and his body burning as he scored his last messages to the world in heaped, muddied oil paint is so strikingly confrontational it has lingered with me for weeks now.
The tar-saturated effigies and sea weathered debris, lumped onto his canvas' initially pushes you away. That tar, in Jarmans words, the void, inevitable oblivion. Our reluctance to engage with the work much like our fear of death - something Jarman confronted with immediacy and a satirical edge.
Jarman's work and life came into my own in such a pristine moment. As I struggle through my own experiences as a trans woman, his legacy, courage and passion is a fire lit beneath my feet. As he recalls the deaths of so many loved ones around him, who so proudly lived out their queerness together against the inescapable onslaught of AIDs, amid a government that couldn't care less. I am forced to confront how times may change yet its urgency has not.
Charlotte Prodger writes to Charlie Porter on her film Passing as a Great Grey Owl :
"What does it mean when you're away from all those signifiers to be a queer body?"
I felt myself occupying that same space, finding myself in nature as she does. No one to see what is worn, not the piercings on my face nor the muddied shirt that sticks to my breasts. My keys bouncing off my thighs, no one but me to hear it. In that state of alone, the semiotics disappear, they fade against the green and damp. It's just me.
But I am not there in the green. I am here, chasing there. I undress myself into the landscape, discarding those things that make me. Turning myself over amongst the grass.I want to paint the thin membrane between me and there.
