'Variable Gesture Units' Exhibition Essay: Melinda Clyne 'Light is Time, Gesture is Space'

Variable Gesture Units “The fundamental life of any material I use is concretized in that material’s gesture…

Manifest in space, any particular gesture acts on the eye as a unit of time.

Performer or glass, fabric, wood … all are potent as variable gesture units...”

Carolee Schneeman1

Melinda Clyne, Hexagon, Personalised, 2020, cast acrylic and enamel (Image courtesy the artist)

A gesture is generally understood as a brief action of the body in space. Whether it’s a wave, flourish or flinch – it derives from the effulgence of living and communicating, and above all is expressive of an emotional state. Gesture in painting though is another thing; it is more specifically tied to the artist’s hand, and by extension the brush, loaded with the potent and visceral matter of paint as coloured mark. To read gesture in paint is also to read emotion, but it is a visual and material tracing of a mark as a past action. While the colour, character and form remains vibrant, the action is already in the past. The paint has dried and is still. In that cured 1 Carolee Schneeman “I Assume the Senses Crave …” (1974) republished in Carolee Schneeman: Uncollected Texts ed. Brandon W Joseph (Brooklyn, Primary Information, 2018).

state though, the gesture as a frozen movement remains permanently open to spectation and interpretation - a moment in an object - to be returned to time and again. In Melinda Clyne’s solo exhibition at Factory 49, Light Is Time, Gesture Is Space she gathers versions of gesture and presents them in a way that is neither expressive movement nor dried painting, though they are certainly of them. Made from cast acrylic, applied paint and directed light they embody stilled moments of time and space, as unified material gestures.

The works exhibited utilise industrial sheets of flat acrylic, available in multiple single colours, widths and finishes. Just like paint. In a brief moment of heat and time (just 10 seconds at 200 degrees Celsius), Clyne is able to control and manipulate the acrylic by hand – stretching, bending, and folding the material into its final cast form.

As she works alone, using welding gloves, domestic oven and a table top, the scale is modest and the effect intimate. The pieces are then partially painted, and occasionally cut, with sharp lines, hard angles and muted colours. If lyrical were to meet geometric abstraction in a gestural dance under confinement, here it is.

Presented suspended on white gallery walls, illuminated, the works speak of gesture and formalism in painting while being pinned down to the gaze.

As they are wall-based, Clyne’s works reference the historical position taken by painting, and its attendant authority in addressing an upright viewing stance, though by playfully gesturing from the wall they actively engage sensory perception. Within the works themselves the fusion of the formal concerns of painting with the performativity of immobilised gestures characterises the artistic intention behind this exhibition. Seeing herself primarily as a painter, Clyne set out to find a material form with which she could explore many dualities – eros/logos, emotion/logic, curved/straight, light/dark, hard/fluid, machine/human, ethereal/material. She says she went searching for a visual representation of paradox. She found it, simply and eloquently, in the performativity of heated then cooled acrylic sheets, a material tangle and truce. The visual forms that arose implied a Deleuzian conception of matter, space and being where the fold is the smallest unit of matter; not particles Leibniz’s bodies with their degrees of hardness as well as degrees of fluidity are seen to be elastic, coherent and infinite. If we look closely at these works, to consider their external forms as well as internal striations, there is a strong resemblance to Deleuze’s sensuous, almost geographic descriptions; “Folds of winds, of waters, of fire and earth and subterranean folds of veins of ore in a mine.”

Gilles Deleuze2

The Covid-19 pandemic this year enabled a retreat into the studio to investigate and experiment with process and material and the result is the body of work shown in this exhibition.

2 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, (Tom Conley trans.), London: The Athlone Press, 2006 ed.

Consider the Hexagon, Personalised. At first glance, its form and title reference the known geometry of a hexagon. Yet across its centre, an elongated swell breaks the flawless surface – the emergent fold at odds with rectilinearity and flatness - lifting the form up and away from the wall in a heaving, rippling gesture. The semi-opaque acrylic implies a softness and subtlety about the motion and this is accentuated by the diffused quality of light as it is absorbed into its surface. In a play on painting, Clyne has applied a painted hard edge to the form’s edge, delineating the industrial satin edge from the wall behind, though tellingly she allows this linearity to fade where the gestural movement is at its most pronounced. Other works in the exhibition continue this engagement of expressive form with hard-edged paint. Some pieces in transparent saffron-orange lend themselves to refraction and when lit with high lumen the warp of the material is exposed; the marks of tensile distortion then appearing magnified on the gallery walls. Grids and seriality are also referenced, capturing gestural action in a manner that recalls Muybridge’s motion studies. In certain works, moulded then painted to opacity the references to painting are more obvious and the manipulated material readily recalls buckled and crumpled canvas.

One singular work addresses the Factory 49 site. It is placed so as to continue the line of an internal door jamb, playing out Klee’s adage of drawing in space as taking a line for a walk, the sky blue suggesting, as it has for many artists, immensity and the infinite.

Melinda Clyne, After Midnight, 2020, cast acrylic and enamel

(Image courtesy the artist)

There is another question that arises with this material and that is, why plastic? In a world besieged by and seemingly at war with plastic waste, Clyne justifies the material in practical terms; as art it has permanence and as a versatile material it is a pervasive and essential component of our technological age, specifically medical devices. Asking Clyne about her references reveals a wealth of art historical and other influences; abstraction as it developed in post war painting in Italy and the US; Bonalumi, action painting, Light and Space, Finish/Fetish, Minimalism, Judd and Truitt. Her practice is a contemporary inheritor of these, along with her interests in the role of the haptic body, gesture and Feminism in art - she mentions performance artist Carolee Schneeman as well as writer Anne Summers. A background as a scientist and physiotherapist also explains what she terms her relentless experimentations in materiality. With that knowledge, it is intriguing to consider her affinity for hand-forming this malleable material; essentially using the plasticity of plastic, first as a cast form and later as aerosol paint to resolve tensions in the matter itself. For Clyne it is the obdurate hardness and rectilinearity of the industrial material that presents a challenge to be overcome.

“The material does not want to bend.”

Melinda Clyne, in our studio conversation.

And yet, bend it does. Like paint squeezing up out of the tube in a gush as pure colour there is this inherent flexibility in heated acrylic, which gives the artist elastic control (albeit for an intensely brief time) while leaving no trace of the artist’s hand.

For Clyne, it is essential that the hand of the artist is both seen and unseen in a temporal back and forth between presence and absence, between action and stillness. Unlike the gestural action of a painted brush stroke, there is no possibility of wiping away or overpainting. The material cools and the gesture is cast. Within, embodied in the materiality of the object is a strong evocation of that frozen movement in time.

Variable gesture units is a term borrowed from Carolee Schneeman, the full quotation at the start of this essay seen in a paper clipping in Clyne’s studio, among works being prepared for this show. It seems appropriate, for the way it describes the material itself enacting the gesture, which is then encapsulated in time and space, to act on the eye. The effect is to isolate, magnify, even dramatise the encounter between the object and the viewer. The space for that encounter is the gallery. A Variable Gesture Unit - a brief action of the body in space, captured and displayed for you.

Lisa Pang (Lisa Sharp) November 2020 Exhibition: Melinda Clyne, Light Is Time, Gesture Is Space Factory 49, Marrickville, Sydney 2 - 12 December 2020