This project began with a conversation about how sculpture might make a home for painting and how painting might hold the interior of a sculpture.
We first met at Braziers workshop in 2006 and became increasingly interested in assonance between the imagery, content and structure of our work: hermetic spaces, gestures of protection, shifting scale, the circulation of the internal and external, and bodily apprehensions of space.
Over time, conversations about each other's practice led to an interest in how works might converse - how one work might re-articulate another. How sociability between works might allow for a more nuanced articulation of ideas.
In this work, Sculptures and Paintings play host to each other: a wall painting may be the scenery for a sculpture, or a sculpture be the setting for a painting. We aim for the relationship to be fluctuating and playful.
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| Sharp Dart of Longing Love Watercolour on linen, Roxy Walsh, 2010 |
Ad Reinhardt famously described Sculpture as the stuff you trip over when you are backing up trying to look at a painting. We are proposing structures and shows where Painting might be the thing that slows you down enough to realise you are hearing the sounds of a space quite differently from inside the sculpture, or Sculpture might be the comfortable host to the painting - the place to sit and look slowly (and not be seen to be looking). The images, figures and gestures in the paintings may echo the effects of the sculptures and vice versa. Works may obscure each other in a space for long enough to break the continuity of sense, to require re-orientation in mid journey (as when one stumbles, so things seem new after) (an event, or a turn in the road).
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| Monachos Sally Underwood, 200 |
We are interested in articulating (architectural - spatial and temporal) spaces between (sometimes thinking) bodies and (sometimes visualised) thoughts. Protected spaces (shelters, bodies) are central to both our practices, and the echoes between these protected spaces provide the sytnax - and the momentum - for this collaborative undertaking.
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| Exclamation, Comma, Point Watercolour on gesso panel, Roxy Walsh, 2011 |
We have been interested in how visitors to certain exhibitions and collections are encouraged to change pace, or find contemplative space within an institution: for example, in the Isabella Stewart Gardiner museum in Boston there are paintings hung at right angles to the walls the better to catch light, and small shrine like settings for some of the paintings: Or the reading table in Kettle's Yard, where one can pause from looking and let things settle. We have talked a lot about the Sir John Soane museum with its moveable picture walls, and about John Cage's last planned show Rolywholyover: A Circus where the museum racks became central to the process of the continually changing exhibition. We have also been looking at the pictorial bracketing and narrative organisation of Sienese paintings from the 1400s.
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| A firing experiment Sally Underwood 2009 |
On this blog are photographs of work we have made together, and of works that have direct relevance to future plans for the work, and links to our individual websites.
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| The Virgin Mary of Las Cuevas Francisco de Zurbaran Museeo de Bellas Artes Seville Date c. 1644-5 |
By means of these beginnings, these slight differences, and the appeal . . . of my carefully subdued, reserved manner, I shall attract to myself one intimate friend, whom I shall influence deeply.
Bishop, Elizabeth. 'In Prison'. Collected Prose. Chatto & Windus, 1994: p.190.
