Untitled (Reflection)

Paper
Boardroom Committee Room, Water Row, Glasgow

24/10/24 – 31/10/24

Paper was an exhibition curated by Dora Padfield and Liv Fox. Following an open call for work on or about paper, the exhibition included a proposed work which I wanted to make.

This piece of work (artefact) was developed to respond to underlying research questions which underpin my current and ongoing practice. My practice-based research asks:

In what ways do specific repetitive and process-driven mark-making strategies foreground and challenge the meditative, durational aspects of artistic production?

How does the strategy of employing iterative mark-making techniques allow for exploration of persistence, variation and error within painting, and what does this reveal about the role of process in contemporary abstraction?

In order to address these key lines of questioning with a view to contributing new knowledge to the field(s) of contemporary painting, the following were considered in the making of the work for the exhibition.

- Definitions of durational looking and the pensive gaze
- Definitions of what I contyend to be to be core elements of contemporary abstraction (persistence, variation and error)
- Why process is especially important in contemporary abstraction

The way that Untitled (Reflection) responds to these concerns can be identified through the narrative of its making.

I had previously been gifted a work on paper by the artist Dora Padfield. Her work focuses on abstracting signs and motifs from the built environment and she uses these to develop abstracted works.

Untitled (Reflection) reflects on Dora’s original charcoal work (also Untitled) through a process of carefully re-enacting the abstracted source material through close observation and then transposes it to a new medium. Rather than a copy or re-presentation, this new work is an iteration or version of Padfield's work, offering up a new looking experience. To develop my work, the source material was focused on visually for prolonged periods of time to better comprehend the composition, through consideration of the markmaking order whjich would have been required to arrive at the finished abstracted composition. This activity constituted an interpretive rewinding of the making process, which was then re-enacted.

The two works on paper were exhibited together on a single OSB panel. The resulting single 'work' offered a dual viewing experience. The abstract motif now encouraged an oscillating gaze between the paper pieces. The viewing experience was such that individuals could look for the correspondences between the pieces, could notice errors or moments when one work departed from the other, whilst the clear strategies of making (placing pigment on paper and cutting through paper) were also made clearly visible.