Text: Within Touching Distance

Within Touching Distance

May 2021

At the outset, I had the view that the obsessively painted weaves and unpicked threads directed thought toward barriers themselves; to the appearance and type of material that often impacts how we understand space within everyday physical areas. Sitting in the gallery space, looking at the work against the backdrop of the last year of lockdowns and social distancing, it is important to make note of the new aspects of the work which have come to light.

The paintings resembling woven fabrics started life as ways to draw focus onto the surface materiality of meshes which are often used to break up or surround spaces such as gardens, allotments, building sites or interior spaces. However, through the process of making these types of works, the meditative quality of repeatedly pushing and pulling paint has come to the fore. Of course, the beauty of repetitive mark-making is nothing new within painting, but for me, making these works for Touching Distance was about more than just the same (or similar) actions taking place over and over again. The focus within the making was more about how one brushed line of pigment on substrate related to the next, to the next and so on.

Looking at the paintings in the gallery - surrounded by white walls – they actually seem to be less about barriers and more about the edges of the painted lines; about the little moments of overlap and the tiny gaps which emerge as one brushstroke goes over and the next goes under. As paintings, the compositions function because of the ways that each part relates to its neighbouring part - creating the overall form within the picture plane.

With a painting like Dark Barrier Weave (p.9) and with with the unpicked canvas barriers (p.33), viewers are invited to move close to them to properly view them. Even this ‘invitation’, after a year of keeping two metres apart and of being ever more wary of getting near to surfaces of any sort, seems to be brought into sharp relief as I watch visitors begin to notice details whilst at a ‘social distance’. Then, after a hesitation, they often move toward the works so that the unpicked threads or the glimpses of colour amidst the woven lines can be better seen. I don’t feel that I’m overstating how interesting this slight movement from viewers is - to me it really does seem quite poetic and connected to the ways that painting continually attracts us, can draw us toward it. It can offer us a space that we can enter into, a space to which we can very much be within touching distance.

The short exhibition itself has been a chance to see people in the flesh again, so to speak. Like everyone, writing as I am in May 2021, I feel it’s been a long time since I was able to really meet with others, to see art and exhibitions and being able to do this again has been refreshing. It has been like a semblance of returning to pre-covid times. There have been, however, no embraces, no handshakes and few smiles that could be seen, given mask-wearing guidelines.

For me, there has been a sense that thoughts and ideas, discussions and observations are able to have had tangible reference points once again. A slight stretch maybe, but even the idea of once again being able to see works in proximity to other pieces; to see a knot painting next to a weave work, next to an unpicked barrier installation allows for the themes embedded in them to be readjusted, to move out of being isolated and become more interconnected; with each part being related to every other part, like a knot being pulled tight.