At Alma Pearl, Hertford Road, London N1 5ET
15 March to 13 April 2024
Painting is not only a physical endeavour for the artist, the maker, but is also a phenomenon for an audience to participate in an intriguing experience that the artist has recorded in their own unique way. This is partly what exhibitions are for. The artist is a gift maker. We should be appreciative and respond constructively.
Alma Pearl is a relatively new space, barely a year old. This was my first visit and I was enraptured by this display. There were just eight paintings plus half a dozen fabric/collage pieces (subtitled – sensitive fibres) that made for an exhibition within an exhibition. Despite generous expanses of white space between the paintings the walls felt full due to the visual impact of the works of various sizes. The curation, therefore, was just right.
I had not seen a Lydia Gifford painting in the flesh since 2015 when my eldest daughter took me along to the Laura Bartlett gallery. On that occasion I was impressed, though a little shocked, by the bareness and rawness of the mostly monochrome artefacts. The works were obviously paintings, but there was an element of sculpture, in the unmonumental sense, and of the expanded field aspect of contemporary painting. I felt primed for something even though I had only tasted a small selection from the artist’s oeuvre and I looked forward to seeing more. How time flies.
It was the final day of the exhibition at Alma Pearl and I had booked a place for Lydia Gifford’s interview with art critic, Tom Morton. My daughter’s here too. Before the discussion we had ample time to look at the work displayed on the walls. There were written notes to be made too as, inevitably, personal thoughts emerged from the looking. As viewers this is one way of participating. It’s not everyone’s practice but one legitimately connects to the visual and physical by recording reactions in this way. Others will talk excitedly with a fellow viewer (not my style) or will keep their thoughts to themselves. But there is undoubtedly a dialogue of some kind going on, which may well echo back to what transpired for the artist in her studio, out of doors in the countryside or in the urban environment. Either way, the experiences of the artworks are a form of an earthbound, quotidian transcendence for artist and viewer alike. The viewer must be as open minded as the artist and to make the experience of looking at artworks as active as possible.
I had not planned to write anything for wider dissemination than my own notebook, but here they are, amended a little and given the form of notes masquerading as free verse muddled with loose haiku. Part two includes quotations from Gifford’s responses to Morton’s questions, as well as my own notes that were very much prompted by what Gifford had to say.
Notes (1)
Materiality
The paint substance
Just as it is.
Read the mark
Realise the surface
Take it in.
Bound within a rectangle it’s difficult not to think ‘composition’
Movement
Active.
Scrim as underlying material structure but mobile, unsteady, loose
Or rather, in a slow state of flux
Finding and losing.
Images return as the mind’s eye attempts to make some visual sense out of what might be a form/instance of chaos
But the chaotic has structure too
(Do I really mean chaos?)
Does one ‘see’ a figure or a compositional structure?
A building or a scene of some sort
A isualised subject matter (such as landscape).
Then the substance of the paint brings one back to its smeary constituency
Stuff creating form
Or denying form and structure to emphasise its materiality.
Earth colours, including orangey brown and gentle greens
Straightforward marks and textures, as in not fussed about with
A sense of fingers and hands smearing and pushing/dragging the paint around, over, into.
The works stop/are resolved just in time
No nonsense or overstatement
Intuitively created, acts of play.
Risk becoming manifested as confidence
Or take it or leave it
But maybe give some time, some attention, for this may make sense in a certain frame of mind that is more intuitive, yet everyday.
Here is a painting
Chaos is only theory
Join me in what I see and experience.
Interim
The title for the exhibition, Low Anchored Cloud, was taken from Mist, a poem by Henry David Thoreau from his Poems of Nature (1895).
Low-anchored cloud,
Newfoundland air,
Fountain-head and source of rivers,
Dew-cloth, dream-drapery,
And napkin spread by fays;
Drifting meadow of the air,
Where bloom the daisied banks and violets,
And in whose fenny labyrinth
The bittern booms and heron wades;
Spirit of lakes and seas and rivers,
Bear only perfumes and the scent
Of healing herbs to just men’s fields.
Notes (2)
L.G. and T.M.
Spoke of a poem
A “real poem” (LG)
Grapple with.
Flowing nature of textile and body absorption
Psychedelic nature
The physicality of something transient.
“Unbelievable reality, I see all around me.” (LG)
Feel
Vaporous sense of self
But in this world, this moment.
Cultivate marks
Not a linear way of mark making
To open up a way of (mark) making.
Edit
Cover
Extract.
“Honour the consciousness of the moment.” (LG)
Time
Now, not fixed
Lived.
“I love drying time… cultivating.” (LG)
Refine the haphazard.
“There isn’t a finishing point – you can make another one.” (LG)
“I like awkward.” (LG)
Learning to sense
Entrap, to peel open
To ooze through the layers.
“Make a kind matter.” (LG)
Closeness.
“What are thoughts and how we hold consciousness together?” (LG)
Fluid, lost in time
Feel durational
Can’t quite capture.
“There’s no image.” (LG)
Terror
Wonderment
And awe.
“It’s being living.” (LG)
“Colour is embodied in textiles.” (LG)
Blood
Sweat, tears
Procedural.
“Textile is very time based.” (LG)
Re: Titles: “Not closing down.” (LG)
Not closed by a title
A nudge
To add.
Mushrooms build and connect
Ever spreading
Through or around obstacles.
‘Mycelium’
Construct of time
And thinking
Terrified.
At peace.
Lint holds
Makes things right
Balanced.
Classical
Imbalanced
Proportion.
“I try to unfamiliarise the marks.” (LG)
Text: © Geoff Hands (April 2024)
All images of paintings © Lydia Gifford
LINKS:
Alma Pearl – https://almapearl.com/exhibitions/11-lydia-gifford-low-anchored-cloud/
Laura Bartlett – https://archive.laura-bartlett.com/lydia-gifford-2/
Henry David Thoreau – https://poets.org/poem/mist
Ruminations: Exhibition Reviews 