Caesuras pauses and stuttering in the language of painting

“What happens when one’s language is not heard? Or heard, but not recognized? When one’s speech carries within it holes of silences: hesitations, pauses, caesuras, stutters, and apprehensions?”1

Sharp & Kelly: Unmake / make / denouer / nouer Exhibition at Factory 49 Paris Pop Up 122 rue Amelot, Paris 75011, March 30 – April 23, 2016

Lost language, unreadable texts and the gaps and holes of silences within a matrix of Lisa Sharp / Wendy Kelly unmake / make / dénouer / nouer improvised language – these things found visual expression, unexpected solace and an

increasing synchronicity, in this exhibition by Sharp (that’s me) and Kelly (that’s Wendy) Factory 49 Paris Pop Up Vernissage à 18h le mercredi 30 mars 2016 122 rue Amelot, Paris 75011 in Paris earlier this year. du jeudi au samedi de 3h à 19h au samedi 23 avril 2016

Lisa Sharp, Weft Painting

Sharp, Weft Painting (detail) & Kelly, Graphite Night Wendy Kelly, Graphite Night

So there I was, in Paris, aiming to establish myself as a painter. I had completed art www.lisa-sharp.tumblr.com www.factory49.blogspot.com school and was speaking in another language about my works, my self and my ideas. www.wendykelly.com.au

French is not my native language, but one that I had once learnt and lived with, so it is

at once foreign and familiar to me, yet always, fluency eludes me. When I wasn’t standing in the gallery communicating with a visitor – a communication marked by my stuttering, pausing and searching for intelligibility, I was using the gallery space to make a work with the language of painting. As a painter I was painting Painting, using as my verbs its vocabulary - traditional materials, familiar form and history - to make its noun.

Whether speaking painting or making painting, my communication was a search for fluency, carrying within it the holes of silences, hesitations, pauses, caesuras, stutters and apprehensions, aspects that I see taking form in the works in the exhibition.

Looking closely at the works of Sharp and Kelly, I saw the holes of silences. The uneven gaps where wax had failed to adhere, paper had torn or edges didn’t quite meet. I noticed the small hesitations of shuddering lines, and there // there was the caesura, felt as a pause between the rhythms of repeated actions. A soft stuttering as layers dried then cracked open. Colour was muted to a monochromatic plane, covering but not concealing what lay beneath. Underneath a ground layer of language, glimpsed beneath the cracks, holes and striations, a silent and unreadable structure.

Sharp, Clement: A tacked up painting is still a painting, 2016 (detail), copper wire, rabbit-skin glue & chalk on canvas Kelly, Whiteout, 2015 (detail) collaged foreign language book pages, torn rice paper, glue & graphite

Kelly’s works start with her collecting antique books printed in languages foreign to her. Rendered distant by time and understanding, she spoke of a secretive, “almost guilty” process of taking the books and pages apart. It was as if the conceptual loss of language had to precede its physical dismemberment, followed by collaged remaking as a visual language.2 The title of our joint exhibition unmake / make / dénouer / nouer references this process, visible in the works, and the verb dénouer is specific to the idea of beginning with unmaking, untangling or unravelling, as nouer is to subsequently making, knotting or weaving. I think for both of us, the visibility of our processes was fundamental to the pictorial result.

Kelly, Collected Series 1 & 2, 2015, collaged foreign language book pages, torn rice paper, glue & graphite, 56 x 37.5 cm

For me, my start is materially reductive. I use the language of painting, and particularly of its beginnings, its first words. The old, simple formulas of chalk and glue, pigment and tempera, the pared down phrase of stretched canvas as woven textile, then from textile to thread. So, where Kelly tore pages from books, I wove from cotton string

dipped in gesso, using a frame as a loom. After all, language is a structure analogous to a woven fabric. There is its written form - text or writing - as a series of constructed geometric forms, applied to surface by hand or printed as sign. There is also its spoken form - sound, accent, jargon, shortcuts and repetition of learnt phrases, broken into small bits and fragmented phrases. Small bits and fragments reformed, the learning of language.

My speech stuttered and was incomplete, as was my weaving. A French painter once referenced the expression bĂŞte comme un peintre (as dumb as a painter) for what he was turning away from, yet unlike Duchamp I was turning towards painting.3 For I am not a clever weaver, fluent in the linguistic web of threads and knots and bobbins, I am a clumsy painter, seeing in the weave a matrix, and a hesitating, holey one at that for a visual language I am continually learning.

As a resident artist my Paris experiment was to use the gallery space for a performative weaving activity. Every artist fears the emptiness of a show unvisited. Yet every artist brings with them in their bodies, actions and speech the kinetic memory of making, and I intended to explore the dualities of making / displaying art. By making a weaving / painting by the gallery window I could dispel apprehension by being busy. At the same time I could bring together not only the space of studio / gallery but also activity / object.

Sharp, Donald: Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface, 2016 (week 1)

Actual Space … (week 2)

So there I was in Paris, aproned and weaving a work in a gallery vitrine. Was I, and the piece I was making to be looked at or through or both? I seemed to be enacting one of the classic dilemmas of modernist abstract painting. Was I trapped, like the zombie formalist I feared I was, inside a giant Greenbergism? Yet the very posture of facing the street, today’s Paris street, began to influence the development of the weaving.

Actual Space … (week 3)

On my return to Sydney I read this essay by Cynthia Cruz, and while admiring the insights into the work of Eva Hesse and other artists, those who sought to find a vernacular outside the mainstream, her language references took me back to thinking about the Paris exhibition, and to seeing visual parallels with the language of painting.

And then there is this // this language of writing, perhaps the one I am most comfortable in. As a French arts writer once said, “et moi aussi je suis peintre”. Me too, Apollinaire.4

Images courtesy of the artists.

1

Cynthia Cruz, “The Disappearers” February 16, 2016 http://hyperallergic.com/274544/thedisappearers/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Weekend Carrie Moyer Americas Secret Societies Puccinis Manon Lescaut The Disappearers Chris Killip Future&utm_content=Weekend Carrie Moyer Americas Secret Societies Puccinis 2 Wendy Kelly, Lisa Sharp & Wendy Kelly Factory 49 Paris Pop Up, Exhibition Catalogue, March 2016 https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4n5tRLTAqJqSURwX0lXZXc3RUk/view 3 Marcel Duchamp 4 Guillaume Appollinaire