Open 11am-5pm Fri-Sun 3-18 August
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From a White Ground (detail: Left: Nicole Ellis; Right: Barbara Halnan)
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ROOMSHEET
Lisa Sharp, Tabula Rasa for two: time and tempo
If I were to say to you, or you to me, I come from a white ground, what would we see in our minds’ eye? I may see an ancient place
where bleached ruins and relics lie partly buried by shifting white sands. Or
snow. You might see shimmering spectral forms approaching the present from
afar, the scene as indistinct as an overexposed mirage in blinding light. A
whiteout. Extremes. Desert heat. Polar cold. Silence. A place, or space, where
the elements of ground and light are foremost. For visual artists though, the
exhibition title’s reference to unmarked white ground is the classical material
beginning. It means a freshly primed canvas, a crisp sheet of blank paper, a
lump of unformed clay, with all the expansive potential of unexpressed
pictorial expression locked into a surface of blank and impassive whiteness.
For a painter a white ground is the first layer, an underlying source of light
and luminosity that can be returned to, to let light in, during the making of a
painting. For a printmaker white is the negative ground, the space untouched by
impression or ink.
A white ground is also a tabula rasa, the Latin term literally meaning a scraped tablet, a used and reused surface, marked and then scraped back, bearing
as history all the incomplete residues of past messages. This makes it all the
more appropriate to describe the continual development and communication of the
abstract visual language common to the practices of Nicole Ellis and Barbara
Halnan. In this joint exhibition From a White Ground they present new works, developed separately yet linked by their
ongoing dialogue with white ground. Each set out to investigate the role and
meaning of white ground by allowing it a certain primacy as their works emerged
from and engaged with it. The rasa
action, of scraping back, provides a telling analogy for Ellis’ textile
collages on canvas, which rely more on innate materiality than intervention to
convey meaning. In Ellis’ work the white ground appears in two states; the
initial white of canvas, recognisable as every painter’s beginning, but also in
the subsequent over painting in white, which is never solid but is often
abraded and in doing so stands for the passage of time.
Conceptually, the
philosophical notion of tabula rasa
as a blank state of mind open to the reception of empirical sensation is
perhaps more descriptive of Halnan’s work, based on arithmetic units and
patterned sequences of progression, tone and scale. Each artist explores the
concept with rigour and also a certain austerity such that, when seen together,
the works come From a White Ground in
ways that function both as asceticism and aesthetic.
Ellis’ Light
Ground series consists of 6 identically sized rectangular canvasses, each
one named and developed around a particular muted hue; purple, grey, brown,
red, gold and pink. Pursuing her
longstanding interest in found colour, found shape and the repurposing of
textiles, remnants and offcuts of manufactured decorator fabrics are laid down
in rectilinear constructions and combined with areas of paint and other
markings. The textile pieces and other elements are placed according to the
rectilinearity of a grid, referencing the historical traditions of concrete and
constructivist art. The effect is also to eschew the movement and dynamism of
diagonals in favour of structure and consolidation, slowing down and pacing the
viewing. In Ellis’ work the hand is restrained in favour of materiality, and
what a poignant material story is told. These carefully salvaged pieces with
their scarred and degraded surfaces convey the passing of time with every
overlapping layer of fabric, each partly obscured design, each echoed pattern,
each familiar motif. Like turning the pages in a book, they build a sense of
time and of loss. As many of the designs are derived from domestic offcuts, the
narration deviates into the personal suggesting once familiar living spaces,
curtains and upholstery of recent memory. Beyond the personal though is the
knowledge that textiles have since ancient times been such rich sources of
social history, meaning and making.
In Halnan’s works, the white ground acts as
that clean slate, a renewed and primal state with forms, structures and
patterns rising up from it, establishing and building the composition up from
the ground. There is a sense of orderly and decisive movement yet, also beneath
the purpose, something tentative, as if testing the stability of ground for the
first time. While the titles of Halnan’s works, Wandering and Meander suggest
an equivocal journey; others like Numbers
and Faultline evoke precision and
systems. The rectilinear grid is referenced again, with works where 9 and then
25 individual panels function as discreet elements of a whole square. Within
the square, elements of line, texture and colour riff and repeat the pattern.
The equivocation, like a melody, is contained in the hand drawn lines of
graphite and in the delicate and sparing use of colour, only pale yellow and
silver-grey, like shadow or reflected light. Textures when present are tenuous,
in a barely raised edge, a rippling of surface, soft as sawdust swallowed into
paint. Geometry is very much in play, with motifs repeated, flipped and
reversed. Halnan’s crafting takes these constructions to crisp precision.
Notably, in each work there is some element of relief; either within the work
itself or between the work and the wall. This modelling, lightly done invites
the viewer to perceive actual space within the work, and so creates a lifting
off from white ground, a lightness.
If we were to walk on white ground through
that bleached and ancient place we first imagined, visibility would be reduced
and other senses heightened. Similarly, the priority given to the role of white
by Ellis and Halnan in this exhibition enables other formal elements and long
held interests in their practices to come to the fore. If white is about
beginnings, a new page and a freshly scraped wax tablet then Halnan’s work,
based so fluently on rhythm, scale and order rises from it like a piece of
music. And if that was a beginning, then Ellis’ work with its pieced layers of
loss and erasure is evocative of endings, of the action of time and memory
having passed over, leaving only material traces.
Lisa
Sharp
July
2019
