A N N - M A R I E JA M E S sea change
A N N - M A R I E JA M E S sea change 19th June – 2nd August 2019
In collaboration with Karsten Schubert Lyndsey Ingram 20 Bourdon Street, London W1K 3PL T. +44
(0)20 7629 8849
E. info@lyndseyingram.com W. lyndseyingram.com
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“Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.” – William Shakespeare, The Tempest
FOREWORD Lyndsey Ingram
It is a great pleasure to be working with
Ann-Marie clearly establishes herself as an
Ann-Marie James for the first time and to
artist who is both brave and innovative.
be presenting her solo show Sea Change. This exhibition consists of two new bodies
Because our gallery has a strong connection
of work – one of which is a response to
to fine art prints, this body of Ann-Marie’s
etchings by Albrecht Dürer and the other
work is particularly appropriate. It is exciting
to Kanagawa Hokusai’s iconic woodcut
to be working with an artist who is engaging
The Great Wave.
with the tradition and practice of printmaking – in her source material and in her
In her painting and drawing, Ann-Marie re-
working practice, but who is also pushing
imagines and reinvents historical imagery,
these boundaries beyond the confines of
using it as the building blocks for her
the print world and into the service of con-
own distinctive and dynamic work. This
temporary art.
approach combines two defining themes
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– her interest in found imagery and her
This show would not have been possible
preoccupation with the notion of metamor-
without the help and support of many friends
phoses. By using familiar images to make
and colleagues. We would like to thank
something wholly new, she simultaneously
Karsten Schubert, Tom Rowland, Kostas
engages with the art historical narratives
Synodis, and Caroline Manganaro for work-
of the past and adds to the conversations
ing with us on this project; Dawn Ades, for
of the future. Standing in front of her work,
her insightful catalogue essay; The Whitworth
one is drawn in by fleeting glimpses of
Museum for generously loaning a work from
something subtly familiar, lurking under
their collection; and Madeleine Bertorelli,
layers of abstract mark making. As she
Morgan Long, and Charlie Fellowes for their
boldly looks to the past and the future,
support and encouragement.
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T R AN S FOR MAT I ONS Dawn Ades
Ann-Marie James’ latest works, the Dürer
physically direct and more visually remote
sequence, and Full Fathom Five and Sea
than the ways in which references to, or
Change, have their origins in prints from
borrowings from the past are most often
two very different traditions: Dürer’s early
manifested in contemporary art.
engravings Madonna With The Monkey (c. 1498) and The Sea Monster (c. 1498),
My starting point was intense curiosity
and Kanagawa Hokusai’s The Great Wave
about what these works are exactly,
(1829-33). At first sight the works that
how physically they were made and
evolved from her fascination with these
with what materials. This in no way, to
prints appear utterly different from their
my mind, interferes with the pleasure
sources: explosive swathes of colour in
of looking at them. The transformation
the paintings Full Fathom Five and Sea
of the original prints into the utterly
Change and drawn forms massed and
different finished works is embedded in
interlocked in the Dürer, as if sucked into
the complex processes of their making.
a whirlwind. They are wild, multi-layered,
The stunning Full Fathom Five and Sea
fabulous eruptions. The visible spon-
Change sequences, for example, are
taneity and gestural freedom are no
voyages into the extraordinary pigment
illusion. By contrast the prints, although
Prussian blue which Hokusai also used.
so unlike each other, share effects based
His enthusiasm for this pigment, new to
on pure line: in Dürer, the precise marks
him, is evident by its dominance in his
of the burin and in the Hokusai wood-
series of woodcuts, 36 Views of Mount
cut carving, the curvilinear profile of
Fuji, which included The Great Wave. The
the great wave. James’s paintings and
medium and the process, for James, are
drawings have an unusual relationship
not just steps towards a goal but them-
with their sources, which is both more
selves act as metaphors for the subject,
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which could be thought of as a process of
Both the After Dürer drawings and the
linking and translating through time.
Full Fathom Five and Sea Change paintings have their starting points materially
To step back, for a moment, to the titles. Full
in reproductive techniques devised ini-
Fathom Five and Sea Change have multiple
tially very directly from their sources (and
associations: with the watery origins in the
their popular accomplices). With Dürer,
Hokusai print, with the immersive depths of
it was a particular configuration of cloud
the paintings themselves and with Jackson
and sky that attracted James. In Madonna
Pollock’s 1947 painting Full Fathom Five.
With The Monkey fluffy white clouds are
They come from Ariel’s song to Ferdinand
set against a darker sky created with
in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as he falsely
streaked parallel lines. Dürer was using
laments the drowning of Ferdinand’s father:
the relatively new technique of engraving, which was diametrically opposed
Full Fathom Five thy father lies;
to the older craft of the woodcut. James
Of his bones are coral made;
had two rubber stamps made from line
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
drawings based on the Dürer print, which
Nothing of him that doth fade,
were the starting points for her huge
But doth suffer a sea-change
Dürer drawing. Working vertically on the
Into something rich and strange.
paper, first with the stamps and then with various pens, was a physically demanding
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This is one of the greatest poems about
process. Having established the general
metamorphosis, the fantastic translation
shape of the composition with the rubber
of one element into another, animate to
stamps the idea was to connect them to
inanimate, animal to mineral, against the
one another. This involved drawing with
finality of death.
a variety of pens, especially a Japanese
pigment pen which is very fine and very
early engravings like Madonna With The
strong. To make the connections, which
Monkey, was a greater naturalism in the
materialise the process of translation,
sense of being able to indicate through
was precarious and strenuous: precar-
the curvature, width and intervals of the
ious, in the sense that, unlike with the
lines detailed effects of light and shade,
paintings, a mark once made is there
texture, concavities and convexities. It is
– the decision was made and there is no
very interesting that the ribbonlike sweeps
going back; strenuous in that working
in James’s After Dürer works, linking the
across the vertical paper required bodily
whole, are interspersed with crosshatch-
gestures of the whole arm and shoul-
ings and diagonals, which recall the way
der, not just the hand. This and other
Dürer himself superimposed a system of
aspects of the large Dürer drawing link it
diagonals onto crosshatchings to create
perhaps unconsciously to the engraving
a kind of “double cross-hatching.” The
technique of the original. This has been
effects of light and shade, depth and tex-
described as having an “inward geome-
ture in James’s drawing are now abstract,
try”, owing to the movement of the burin,
in the sense of being no longer attached
a sharp-pointed chisel which cuts directly
to a specific object.
into the copper plate. This movement unmodified would be straight parallel
Full Fathom Five and Sea Change sim-
strokes, but the plate is placed on a small
ilarly had a specific starting point, also
sand-filled cushion which is rotated while
mediated through the proliferation of
the burin is pushed forward, so that the
popular iterations of the famous Hokusai
lines it creates “are determined by the
image: postcards for example, and a coin
interaction of two impulses, one straight,
stamped with the wave, the source of the
the other circular”.1 The effect, visible in
circular form particularly noticeable in
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Full Fathom Five V. The image was trans-
have lasting blue – the Ancient Egyp-
ferred to the aluminium on different
tians, who had a synthetic pigment in use
scales, using the photographic processes
from the 4th millenium BC, whose secret
and enlargements of screenprinting. The
was later lost, and the Maya, who had a
motif is often submerged and the primary
pigment made of indigo dyes and a rare
impact is the extraordinary dynamism
clay; it was extensively used in murals,
of the painted surfaces, their layers and
from c. 800 at cities such as Chichen Itza
depths, and the dark, dense blue of the
and Bonampak, whose colours are still
pigment Prussian Blue.
vivid today, and was still in use in the early colonial period after which the technique
A Note on Prussian Blue. Prussian Blue
seems to have been lost. In the early 19th
was the first modern synthetic pigment,
century Prussian Blue reached Japan.
the result it is said of an experiment gone
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wrong: trying to make a red dye using
Almost like a reaction against the
iron sulphate and a blood-tainted potash
demands of drawing, in Full Fathom Five
produced the compound iron ferrocy-
and Sea Change James revels in all the
anide, which turned out to be a strong
things paint can do and drawing can’t.
blue rather than red. Discovered at the
It can, for example, flow and pool when
beginning of the 18th century, it was the
poured onto the metal sheet, creating
first stable and lasting blue pigment
edges; it can be swept, flicked, dripped
available to artists in Europe apart from
and smudged with hands, brushes, pal-
the excruciatingly expensive ultramarine,
ette knife, thumbs, elbows. The complex-
made from lapiz lazuli mined in Afghani-
ity of the painted surfaces demands time
stan. The only other sources of blue were
to observe, to take in the layers created
liable to fade. Two early civilisations did
by the mediums: a transparent resin,
white and Prussian blue. Contrasting
part of it. There is no denying that these
with the free, turbulent movements of
terms, abstraction and figuration, are
the paint are thin white lines threading
still handy and respond to something in
across the surface, sometimes marking
the ways we look at paintings. There is a
contours, and a multitude of details. Seen
long history behind James’s integration of
close to, for example, are tiny sponge-like
accident, of free, spontaneous marks with
microscopic forms, some deliberately
the recognisable image. The surrealists,
outlined in indigo, some congealing
in their challenge to what was conven-
and separating on a pool of blue, surely
tionally understood as the “real”, rejected
created by chance. Behind them is the
naturalism and championed automatism.
white net of the silkscreen, and suddenly
This led visually to a spontaneity which
the swooping form of the wave. The
verges on the abstract, and was hugely
effect is to make us, the viewer, feel like
influential on the Abstract Expressionists,
the almost invisible figures in the boats
such as Jackson Pollock. The surrealists
tossed in the seas of Hokusai’s print,
were neither at home with the realists nor
exposed to the blue depths.
with the abstract school led by Clement Greenberg which required that a picture
In James’s earlier sequences, Proserpina
draw its objective value from itself alone.
and Le Monde Moderne, the entire com-
For the surrealists the opposition was
position shuttles between abstraction
never so cut and dried; their practice of
and figuration, as Michael Bracewell put
decalcomania, for example, dissolved
it 2. In the new works, she continues
the opposition between abstract and
to shake up this opposition in richly
figurative.3 This involved spreading black
suggestive ways. Recognising Hokusai’s
gouache or ink on a sheet of white sat-
wave among the abstract shapes is only
ined paper, then pressing a similar sheet
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onto this and slowly lifting it up, creating
trol which seems to underlie the whole
accidental abstract configurations, which
process runs parallel with but doesn’t
could trigger associations: underwater cav-
precisely overlap the alternation between
erns, rocky landscapes, moss-covered walls.
material and image. These paintings are absorbing and inexhaustible, full of
Freed from any immediate duty of faith-
surprises. Translating the source prints,
fully representing the external world,
distant in time, to contemporary tech-
painting revels in ambiguity, of space,
nologies (in which nothing is given) has
object, texture, light and dark, edge
been a process of discovery.
and void, transparency and skin. In Full Fathom Five and Sea Change no sooner has one image been recognised than another suggests itself, setting up recurring analogies. This could be the foam
1 Erwin Panofsky The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer Princeton 1955, p.64 2 Michael Bracewell “Ovid, Bernini and Ann-Marie James” Ann-Marie James Ridinghouse 2013, p.5
of the wave, or white feathers, or coral, or a floral pattern on lace, or the head of a dragon. Scale is so ambiguous that forms could be microscopic creatures in the depths or giant sea monsters. White splatters and drips are also the cosmos. Always there is the shuttle between paint and our associations, what we recognise, what we read. Then we return to the materiality of pigment, colour, texture. The tension between accident and con-
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3 André Breton “D’une décalcomanie sans objet préconçu (Décalcomanie du désir)” Minotaure no. 8 1936, p.18
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A F T E R H O KU S A I
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Sea Change I Acrylic on aluminium with screenprint, 2019 Signed in ink verso 160 × 110 cm
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Sea Change II Acrylic on aluminium with screenprint, 2019 Signed in ink verso 160 × 110 cm
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Sea Change III Acrylic on aluminium with screenprint, 2019 Signed in ink verso 160 × 110 cm
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Sea Change IV Acrylic on aluminium with screenprint, 2019 Signed in ink verso 160 × 110 cm
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Full Fathom Five I Acrylic on aluminium with screenprint, 2019 Signed in ink verso 35.5 Ă— 28 cm
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Full Fathom Five II Acrylic on aluminium with screenprint, 2019 Signed in ink verso 35.5 Ă— 28 cm
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Full Fathom Five III Acrylic on aluminium with screenprint, 2019 Signed in ink verso 35.5 × 28 cm
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Full Fathom Five IV Acrylic on aluminium with screenprint, 2019 Signed in ink verso 35.5 Ă— 28 cm
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Full Fathom Five V Acrylic on aluminium with screenprint, 2019 Signed in ink verso 35.5 Ă— 28 cm
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AFTER DÜRER
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After DĂźrer F Archival ink on paper, 2018 Signed in pencil 21 Ă— 14.8 cm
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After DĂźrer H Archival ink on paper, 2018 Signed in pencil 21 Ă— 14.8 cm
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After DĂźrer G Archival ink on paper, 2018 Signed in pencil 21 Ă— 14.8 cm
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After DĂźrer J Archival ink on paper, 2018 Signed in pencil 21 Ă— 14.8 cm
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After DĂźrer N Archival ink on paper, 2018 Signed in pencil 21 Ă— 14.8 cm
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After DĂźrer O Archival ink on paper, 2018 Signed in pencil 21 Ă— 14.8 cm
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Madonna with the Monkey (After DĂźrer) (Detail right, full image illustrated overleaf) Archival ink on paper, 2018 Signed in pencil 151 Ă— 273 cm
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After DĂźrer #12 Archival ink on paper, 2017 Signed in pencil 35 Ă— 27 cm
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After DĂźrer #14 Archival ink on paper, 2017 Signed in pencil 35 Ă— 27 cm
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After DĂźrer #17 Archival ink on paper, 2017 Signed in pencil 35 Ă— 27 cm
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After DĂźrer #19 Archival ink on paper, 2017 Signed in pencil 35 Ă— 27 cm
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After DĂźrer #20 Archival ink on paper, 2017 Signed in pencil 35 Ă— 27 cm
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After DĂźrer #23 Archival ink on paper, 2017 Signed in pencil 35 Ă— 27 cm
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After DĂźrer #24 Archival ink on paper, 2017 Signed in pencil 35 Ă— 27 cm
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After DĂźrer #26 Archival ink on paper, 2017 Signed in pencil 35 Ă— 27 cm
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After DĂźrer #29 Archival ink on paper, 2018 Signed in pencil 35 Ă— 27 cm
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BIOGRAPHY
Ann-Marie James (born 1981) lives and works in Suffolk. James studied MA Fine Art at Wimbledon College of Art (2010–12); Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design (2010) and BA (Hons) Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (2001–04). James reworks imagery from art history to investigate her own responses to individual artworks, to the artists that made them, and to their themes and origins. She is interested in the idea of metamorphosis, and the connectedness of all things in an ongoing cultural conversation that stretches right back to ancient myth. Her awards include the Artists International Development Fund, The British Council (2016); The Derek Hill Foundation Scholarship at The British School at Rome (2013–2014); MFI Flat Time House Graduate Award, supported by the John Latham Foundation, London (2012); The Jealous Graduate Print Prize, London (2012) and The Queen's Award, Central Saint Martins Scholarship Awards (2003). She has undertaken residencies at Kettle’s Yard, UK (2019); Wessex Museums Partnership: Wiltshire Museum, Salisbury Museum, Poole Museum & Dorset Museum, UK (2018-2020); The British School at Rome, Italy (2013); Headspace (supported by the Daiwa Foundation), Nara, Japan (2011) and Lantana Projects, Memphis, Tennessee, USA (2006).
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SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2020
2019
Ann-Marie James: Alchemy, Dorset
2013
Knoerle & Battig, Winterthur, Switzerland
Ann-Marie James: Alchemy, Salisbury
Ann-Marie James: Proserpina,
Museum, Salisbury, UK
Karsten Schubert, London, UK
Ann-Marie James: Alchemy, Poole
2012
Installation in the house, Kettle’s Yard,
2011
Cambridge, UK Ann-Marie James: Sea Change,
Metamorphoses (with Alex Hoda), Edel Assanti & 20 Projects, London, UK
Museum, Poole, UK
2018
Ann-Marie James: Musée Imaginaire,
County Museum, Dorchester, UK
Ann-Marie James: Hanami, Soho Art Gallery, Osaka, Japan
2010
Ann-Marie James: Pareidolia, Edel
Lyndsey Ingram, London, UK
Assanti Project Space, London, UK
Ann-Marie James: Alchemy, Wiltshire
Ann-Marie James: Knot, Brahm Gallery,
Museum, Devizes, UK (touring)
Leeds, UK
Ann-Marie James: After Dürer, Fairhurst
2009
Ann-Marie James: Danse Macabre, First Floor Projects, London, UK
Gallery, Norwich, in collaboration with Karsten Schubert, London, UK 2006 2015
Beginning at the end (with Daniel
Ann-Marie James: Le Monde Moderne,
Todd), Art at Carnaby / National
Edel Assanti in collaboration with
Campaign for the Arts, London, UK
Karsten Schubert, London, UK Ann-Marie James: Mobile, The Medicine Factory, Memphis, Tennessee, USA
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The artist wishes to thank Lyndsey Ingram, Amy Graham, Charlotte McGuinnes, Karsten Schubert, Tom Rowland, Kostas Synodis, Caroline Manganaro, Dawn Ades, Madeleine Bertorelli, Doro Globus, Juliet Bailey, Morgan Long, Charlie Fellowes, Edie & Wookiee. Published by Lyndsey Ingram Designed by Lucy Harbut Printed by Dayfold Image credits: p.2 Sea Change III, 2019 (detail) p.5 Madonna with the Monkey (After Dürer), 2019 (detail) p.6 Sea Change I, 2019 (detail) p.13 Madonna with the Monkey (After Dürer), 2019 (detail) p.20-21 Sea Change II, 2019 (detail) p.26-27 Sea Change IV, 2019 (detail) p.33 Full Fathom Five V, 2019 (detail) p.43 Madonna with the Monkey (After Dürer), 2019 (detail) p.51 After Dürer #20, 2019 (detail) Artwork photography by Noah Da Costa Studio photography by Amy Graham All images © 2019 Ann-Marie James