Ghosts, it has been suggested, are the product of our living with the physical artifacts of past generations. We associate objects with individuals – Robert’s tools, Lisa’s desk, Mary’s car. We do it collectively too – the family cottage, the community pool, the neighbourhood store. When confronted by the objects we associate with the dead and departed, when we handle these objects, we feel a connection to those people – their presence – and we call these presences ghosts.
Townscapes (including cityscapes and rural agricultural landscapes), Interiors and Still Life are genres of painting and photography that represent the artifacts of people. These types of representation are literally, “art about art.” That is to say, the objects represented are the artifacts of culture – public places and private homes, domestic furniture, plates, pitchers, bottles, and food, both plain and fancy.
As signs of culture, these types of representation have great flexibility and are capable of speaking to us in very subtle ways. The still life tradition that can be traced to Roman times, for example, may speak to a culture’s love of feasting, revelry or earthy humour. Dutch still life has been variously interpreted as celebrating national prosperity, or as a moral reminder of life’s transience. Abundance and scarcity, wealth and poverty, exoticism and simplicity have all been allegorized by the subjects of still life. Flowers in full bloom, ripe unblemished fruit and full pitchers of fresh milk have typically signalled a sanguine and optimistic attitude towards life. These are the still lifes in waiting rooms and Holiday Inns that make up much of the chintz and wallpaper of our lives.
In the modern period, artists followed Cezanne’s example and still life became a mute support for formal experimentation and abstract composition. In the nineteen-eighties, when traditional genre was reconsidered as art photography, still life, interiors and townscapes were once again understood as symbolic and meaningful. In contrast to traditional genre, a number of photographic artists began to produce pessimistic and highly self conscious images that embraced the representation of age through distressed and accreted surfaces (Roy Arden) material exhaustion and pollution (Edward Burtynsky), and obsolescence (Bernd and Hille Becher). More recently, the German photographer Andreas Gursky has produced large format, digitally manipulated images of super abundance in a dystopic vision of globalized production and international corporate anomie.
It is in this context that the still lives and interiors of Moira Clark stand in quiet opposition. Her interest in genre was stimulated while a student in the nineteen-seventies. At that time, still life, interiors and landscapes were seen as the beginning of a reductive process that lead inevitably to a painted abstraction of the physical world. However, Clark’s still life and interiors, while spare and economically rendered, resisted resolution into compositional abstractions. Instead, rhythmic composition, counter point, pattern and symmetry, traced from the objects of her environment, continued to retain a prosaic and human character.
It is difficult today to imagine just how hard it was to paint genre in the nineteen-seventies. In those years, art schools and public and commercial galleries were in the full embrace of abstraction. For artists like Moira Clark who wished to pursue subject matter in their art, printmaking was one of the few viable alternatives. In the print shop the artful manipulation of the techniques and disciplines of etching, lithography, and block printing took precedence over the ideological battles against representation. As a result, the print studio at York University and the co-operative Open Studio in Toronto provided supportive and stable environments for Clark and other artists who desired to make non-conforming art in a less hostile atmosphere.
The art historian Norman Bryson has suggested that one of the unique characteristics of still life is it’s timelessness. The conventional subject matter of still life, for example – food and food service objects – are virtually indistinguishable from generation to generation. A Roman still life with fruit, or a breakfast composition by Chardin look as edible today as when they were painted. Images like these collapse time into an unchanging and indifferent present, and here lies both still life’s appeal and it source of friction. For those who desire art to bridge generations and ages, still life can be a comforting reminder of constant unchanging values. But for those who feel that a contemporary art should address the dynamism and forces for change in the present, still life is potentially reactionary. Unless pessimistic and critical, like some of the contemporary still life photography that I have cited above, conventional still life proposes relative, detached values – it exists outside politics and the issue-oriented debates of the day.
Moreover, conventional still life poses the uncomfortable question of gender roles. Still life was considered a minor genre by the academicians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – a suitable occupation ideally for a female artist. Of course, one today would never establish such a hierarchy and appoint women to its lower orders, yet the conventional still life may be an area of unconscious discrimination. Here again Norman Bryson sheds valuable light on the gender character of the still life. Comparing still lifes painted by male artists to those by female artists, Bryson notes that inevitably, those painted by males seem to occupy the perspectival centre of the visible universe, as though those objects, or those foods, were the sole and unique property and subject of the viewing artist. He notes however that still life, as painted by female artists, has the character of existing independently of the artist and viewer, as the tools and products of work – not solely of work’s delectation – but as the evidence of “the creatural and ordinariness of domestic culture.” Perhaps then, according to this understanding, we should more correctly distinguish between the genres – still life may be better characterized as male, and the interior genre – female.
Indeed, what has strikes one about Moira Clark’s work is that the subjects of her painting and printmaking are never about her or her surrogate viewer alone. Each work affirms the value of interlacing, interdependence and connection. So, for example, an early etching such as the Staircase with Artichoke Tiles (1979), is a study in asymmetrical symmetry, where the left and right mirror images are almost, but not quite identical. Adjacent doors, parallel staircases and bannisters, and the rendering of the tile pattern are very faithfully described, and yet, as much as the print is an abstract exercise, it is also a metaphor of attachment and identity, where these doors are markers in space for the beginnings of similar, connected, but separate lives.
In Sunlight Through Glass (1982), a still life arrangement of an empty bowl and three tomatoes sits on a table occupying an almost overlooked place in the near foreground, while two pots of geraniums, sit on a widow ledge in the background. Together these objects define a space that otherwise consists of a tangle of confusing shadows and reflections. The physical, tangible character of the still life objects contrasts with an interior space of shifting phantoms and shadow presences. Domestic space in this image may be considered to consist of objects which reflect the spirits of those who live there and whose long shadows are cast over the hard and soft edges of the room.
A rare image by the artist featuring the presence of human figures, The Three Sisters (1986) tends to reinforce the sense that human presence is ineffable at best in Clark’s work. Here it is the figures that are pushed to the edges of the frame and which define the common central space of the table top. Rather insubstantially and summarily rendered, the three sisters form a circle of charged space – a space that is defined by their interaction. The table top is a medium, not unlike a Ouija board, which each of the sisters touch, with arms and legs interleaving above and below the table in circle of connection. In contrast, when the figures are absent from the picture plane altogether as in Three Chairs After Dinner (1977) and All Night Café (1982), everything is more substantial. Chairs that look quite capable of sustaining weight, have not been pushed back to the table, and their random arrangement betrays a recent and hasty departure. The repetitive patterns on the table cloth in Three Chairs After Dinner , or carpet patterning and abstracted arrangements of plants in the back ground of All Night Café are more substantial, more regular and more firmly contoured than any of the three sisters.
In the early 1990's Clark left the print shop. She left the layered, methodical and distanced discipline of printmaking to develop her imagery in the more tactile and direct medium of acrylic. In the process, she moved away from the spatial and compositional explorations of the interiors and began to focus on isolated objects. These objects – food and flowers, plates, bowls, glasses and pitchers – rendered weightless in space, began to hover over soft indeterminate grounds, as though they existed as pure ideas, outside the work-a-day world of food service and hospitality. Sometimes, Clark would present these objects lined up on a narrow ledge, like the unique and individual characters in a family portrait. Flowers, at one time subjects of her still life, became decorative motifs that floated in well ordered columns and rows, in front of and behind of Ironstone plates and pitchers, finally, in later work, to come to rest on the china itself, as part of its decorative surface.
The surfaces surrounding and supporting Clark’s still life objects eventually crystallized into tight weaves of coloured bands, reminiscent of cane or wicker – grounds that began to function as optically vibrating planes – flattening the spaces and removing the air that had at one time had flowed around and between her subjects. She superimposed translucent cut glassware over her colourful grids, muting and softening the hard edges, and in the process these still life objects began to dematerialize. The glassware has become a cipher – a thin veil described only by white contour lines and refractions and extremely subtle modulations of the interleaving grid in the background. Those solid objects that had at one time hinted at human presence, seem to be no longer necessary. Clark has moved on now, to describe the trajectories of connection itself, through weaving, interleaving, intersecting and connecting of bands colour.
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