Light and Colour
Opening remarks for artists Penny Burnett and India Kenning at the Rosny School House Gallery, January 11th 2024
Hands on making
Hands on making, knowledge we gain through using our hands, tacit knowledge or tangible knowledge - gives us a different way of being, knowing and understanding the world, it has helped define humanity for tens of thousands of years, And it feels a little bit naughty a little bit subversive in this moment of instant gratification, digital mediation and an increasingly virtual reality. These skills and sensibilities appear to be fading, they are not economically expedient, they are being dropped in schools. STEAM has become STEM. But they are NOT outdated, they are Not outmoded, or passé. They are in fact Futurisic, Post-apocalyptic even. Hands on skills will be very useful when the networks have been hacked and the power goes out. The old ways will be the New Ways
Painters Penny Burnett and India Kenning are mistresses of their materials, the Slow Burn, the Long Game, They are alchemists spending many hours in their studios, refining skills, processes and transforming materials.
Paints and Pigments
The first paints were ochres dating back 250,000 + years. India sources raw pigments to stain raw canvas. She pours fluid colour and through her process and mark-making, she honours and acknowledges Country its flux of Decay and Regeneration. She has moved herself out of the way, she allows colour to drive the work, colours are her collaborators, Each work has an individual palette and is tethered to specific moments spent connecting with places on this island.
Pigments are tethered to social, political and economic history, ….often involving the exploitation of humans and animals. Ultra marine is named for the passage of precious lapis lazuli across the sea from Afghanistan. Indian yellow comes from the urine of cows fed on mango leaves and Cochineal is a Latin American bug fed on cacti that when crushed magically releases the colour carmine, it was more expensive than gold or cocaine. The art studio is like a laboratory. The ancient Alchemists discovered Inks, dyes and paint, Isaac Newtown was an alchemist and invented one of the first colour wheels. Masblue was serendipitously discovered in the department of Chemistry at Oregon State university. In Alchemy Process was as important as the search for the Philosopher’s Stone and the purification of materials was also the purification of psyche. Substance transformation was self transformation
Colour
Colour is complex, colour is content and colour is contingent on what it is placed next to it, the frequency of light, and whether the surface absorbs or reflects. Then there is the biology of the perceiving organ – our eye, the rods and cones…. We don’t have time to get into this.
The future arrived with a thud when COVID hit and Penny started painting colour charts and posting them online. It was like she was stripping the world back to its essence, to its building blocks, a bare matrix of rhythm, light and colour. The charts are meditative, sequential, rhythmic, even mesmeric: a luminous incantation of light and love and loss, they shimmer like fish scales - an antidote for the ridiculous rushing we were doing before the plague hit. Her gridded restraint increases the expressiveness of these works. And each tile or unit contributes to a greater whole.
Light
As we know light is made up of a spectrum of colour and but when we mix colours in paint we get grey: you have blue greys, green greys, purple greys, brown greys, warm greys, cool greys and it goes on and on……in a tradition of painting the illusion of reality we throw our tubes of black in the bin. Black from the tube kills colour and luminosity, it is the assassin of the palette.
Black and White
Black and white is binary, it is limited. Sure, polarities are an engine that propel life, but Black and white thinking has gotten us into a pickle. Penny is addressing Colour as a political metaphor. Shades of grey are created when nuance is introduced into a system. It becomes complex, it is hard work, it is uncomfortable. A lot of us don’t want to dwell here for much time. But Paying attention to subtletly enlarges our perception.. and Integrating polarities makes a thing whole.
Grey
In western culture the colour grey and greyness gets a bad rap. (although painting your house grey is very bougie) The colour grey is one of contradiction; In Western culture, grey can be associated with conformity, boredom and uncertainty, it can be a progression towards homogeneity or entropy. This grey zone is one of ambiguity and slippery, uncertainty. A mixed grey (not from black and white but grey mixed from many colours) is in fact a colour of complexity, it is a colour beyond duality, and is mid-way between emergence, possibility, and it is full of potential. In the face of the increasing mediation of experience, many of us are returning to working with materials in their many forms and (neuroscience supports the benefits of this feedback loop). I often feel that the meta-work we are doing with our hands is transforming the chaotic, sticky mess of the world and in turn transforming ourselves and If we upgrade our own unit, we help upgrade the entire system.
Breathe
Opening remarks for artist Paul Snell at Despard Gallery, February 9th 2024.
I will begin by being matter of fact about these artworks, they are chromogenic prints face mounted on plexiglass and the edges are extruded Regolith, which is a kind of conglomerate surface Rockdust present throughout the solar system. They come in editions of 3 and yes Tiffany and Louis Vuitton have bought them.
But what are these images of? are they primordial optical soup? Are they the undifferentiated source of all that is? are they fields of energy? Or are they luminiferous aether proposed in the 18th Century as the medium that carries light? Are they Modernist abstraction? Are they Painting are they Photography or are they both? Or are they just Snelly tinkering around in Photoshop and pressing the print button?
These artworks are not of things, they are not about things, they are not windows on the world and they are not in the usual business of representation. They are not what or where the colours come from (although their colour DNA is sourced from the outside world) they are not about the process used to create them. They are not concerned with that stuff at all…..
They are however about Optics and the materiality of light and Colour, their language is frequency and how the polarities of object/screen, surface/edge, reflection/absorption, mutually configure one another.
And they are Beautiful. Dave Hickey, in his seminal book the Invisible Dragon, essays on beauty calls for a reconsideration of this form of allure and our deep distrust of it. He says beauty causes the viewer to take time to discern the meaning of the artwork and thus it can hold powerful political and ethical agendas.
Our society has fetishized the concrete/ the physical world of three dimensions. We regard solid objects as the foundation of our reality. But what happens when the spaces and relationships between things are important and we think in terms of vectors of energy.
Quantum theory gives us a perspective upon space, emptiness and the void that is legitimately magical: the vacuums of physicists Paul Dirac and Werner Heisenberg are teaming and alive, there is in fact no such thing as nothing or the void ( this has perplexed us for centuries). In empty space, quantum particles flit in and out of existence, electromagnetic fields permeate the vacuum, and space itself trembles with gravitational waves.
Space and time co-exist. These works are about space emptying out (out breath) and taking time. They are like a “Once upon a time”. They are about the importance of nothing as the source of everything. This source goes by many names, in many cultures, but this work is not about mysticism or spiritual dogma either.
Paul’s works have become things in and of themselves. They are about the thing they have become. These images are not premeditated and Like AI or single celled organisms rapidly dividing in a pre biotic broth, they are like self organizing and self regulating systems, that will continue to evolve to minimize entropy. And as entropy decreases, dimness gives way to lightness.
To conclude:These images embody their subject, and they perform it. They are a source of light and colour and they emit their own energy. They choreograph us to move in relation to their pearlescent surfaces and their earthy edges and as they develop, they demand that we enlarge our perception, by keeping still, paying attention and remembering to BREATHE.