Paulette Phillips: The Secret Life of Criminals

Like a kaleidoscope the image multiplies, distorts and blends beyond recognition. In The Secret Life of Criminals (2000) the reflected video images of contortionist Jinny Jacinto’s impossibly malleable legs twist and spiral up the inside of the cone and stretch until they seem to touch your nose. You are literally sucked into this woman’s world, which is both familiar yet also so alien. Comprised of a stainless steel cone mounted over a small LCD screen, The Secret Life of Criminals has the appearance of a laboratory experiment. The viewer participates, looking through the cone at a putative criminal (as the title of this work invites you to believe) and becomes part of this experiment, to become both the investigator and the investigated, to lean over and look through the cone to see, and to become part of the image.

* * *

Writer, performer, filmmaker, videographer, installation artist: Paulette Phillips has combined the varied facets of her art practice of twenty years to create The Secret Life of Criminals – a series of video installations that marry short dramatic performances and staged scenarios with the texture and three dimensionality of installation sculpture. The “apparatus of delivery” as Phillips call it – the projectors, the screens and supports – are the physical component of her work. These objects are not a mere media “means to an end” but are integral to her shaping our apprehension of her work. The apparatus of delivery is by turns disruptive or expressive, either confounding our habits of viewing or extending the metaphors and symbols of the recorded drama into real space.

Phillips's video installations disrupt traditional narrative structures and collapse the comfortable space we place between ourselves and the fictions we are invited to consider. Her fictions are, however, only half that – they are true stories heard, events seen and felt, investigations without resolution – facts that live large as both individual and collective apprehensions of the world.

Influenced by the political theatre of Bertolt Brecht, and by contemporary theories of narrative, each work by Phillips is an essay into the space of the viewer.[1] Each work is an attempt to blur the line between the observer and the observed, to compromise the viewer, to destabilize the leering, judgmental gaze and to engage us as inherently prurient – as both voyeurs and a co-authors of the tragedies played out before us. Phillips invites us into scenarios and dramas and sculptural environments that penetrate our contentment and direct us to recall the source of our own compulsive narratives and adult anxieties. The viewer is never allowed the luxury of turning out the lights, to slump down in the anonymity of a dark viewing room to empathize with some tragic narrative, or to be swept away by the artful evocation of sublimity. We are instead constantly recalled to our physical circumstance, to our own position as observers and participants in the spectacle before us.

* * *

It is obviously staged, but that seems not to matter. The image is appalling just the same. “It’s about how people judge appearance” (2000) is a flat panel video monitor, built into the wall and framed in pink faux ostrich skin leather. On screen, a woman walking in an alley approaches the concrete base of a loading dock. She deliberately, and with considerable force, proceeds to smash her own head against it. The camera follows her from the left as she steadies herself on the adjacent wall with her right arm and focuses on the concrete.

She is visibly counting:

One, she inclines forward, then pulls back.

Two, she inclines forward more strongly and again pulls back.

Three, she leans back sharply at the waist, closes her eyes and launches herself head-first into the concrete.

The action is accompanied by a sound – something like a pumpkin smashing or a watermelon dropped from a height – a sound that is very credibly that of a skull being crushed.

Phillips’s unfortunate heroine bounces off the wall and the camera changes angle. We see her from the front now. She recoils and slumps to her knees with a bloody gash on her head. Steadying herself, she struggles to stand up, touching her hand to the wound. Phillips doesn’t leave it at that, however. She plays out the scene twice more in different edits, before it is looped to begin again. You watch the loop once, twice, maybe three times before it becomes too much, and then you turn away. But of course the image remains.

Real and enacted violence directed at others is an ancient form of entertainment. Codified in folklore and myth, perfected as spectacle in the Roman games, rationalized as a source of wealth in professional sports and now a multi-billion dollar corporate industry of film, television and electronic games, the representation of outwardly directed violence is an expression of the commonly held inner desire to strike out and to be decisively effective. We want to become super heroes. We recognize in our emotional responses to violence a primal desire for domination, a fantasy of freedom from coercion and an escape from feelings of powerlessness. Violence as spectacle plays a redemptive role in our popular culture and it is as American as apple pie, as Canadian as maple syrup, as common as dirt.

The image of a woman smashing her head against a wall remains indelible (forget the fact that she gets up and walks away in the end – this does not let her, or us, off the hook), as do many of Paulette Phillips’s images, because that violence is self-inflicted. Self-directed violence, lacking the conventional de-sublimating energies associated with striking out, isn’t widely consumed as entertainment. Buffoons and tragic heroes don’t inflict injury on themselves – their injury is unintentionally the result of foolish neglect or unavoidable fate. We laugh at the buffoon, a subtle maliciousness, not far from violent fantasies of superiority and domination. We identify with tragic heroes mawkishly, as valiant characters like ourselves – comrades with whom we bravely, and at great sacrifice, strive against all odds.

Clearly, “It’s about how people judge appearance.” recounts an unpleasant truth. Phillips’s troubling image illustrates how far these fantasies of domination are from the lives we lead. Neither heroes nor buffoons, our demons are invisible and complex, as much the product of our own minds as invading foreign bodies. We pathologically internalize and nurture our psychic pain, obsess over our shortcomings, nurse our emotional injuries and repeatedly act out our dysfunctional narratives. The subject lashes out, not at some other poor soul, but against the self, inflicting harm as a means of making emotional pain physical and visible – stimulating pain and denying pleasure to generate feeling and to stave off existential emptiness and hollowness.

Self-inflicted violence is an acting out of the text, “I feel like bashing my head against a wall,” or “I want to injure myself,” or even the milder and seemingly innocuous, “I want to deny myself pleasure.” It is not a frustration against the outside, it is a revolt of the inside. Even if it doesn’t present itself in such dramatic terms as head bashing, it may be more commonly manifest in, say, the refusal to participate in something that might be pleasurable or beneficial, or risky behaviour that verges on the reckless.

On another level, Phillips’s protagonists are invariably female, part of the profile of the typical victim of self-directed violence. Making bad choices and repeat offending is clearly a universal malaise, but the particular masochism of self-injury represented by Phillips in her work speaks to us of a pathology most often associated with women and victims of sexual abuse. Andrea Dworkin provides a troubling narrative to this particular gender dysphoria:

The female life-force itself is characterized as a negative one: we are defined as inherently masochistic; that is, we are driven toward pain and abuse, toward self-destruction, toward annihilation – and this drive toward our own negation is precisely what identifies us as women. In other words, we are born so that we may be destroyed. Sexual masochism actualizes female negativity, just as sexual sadism actualizes male positivity.[2]

Or maybe not. Dworkin’s pessimism leaves out the possibility for agency and makes all women out to be victims, while Phillips marvels at the motivation of her protagonists – that they are not frozen by their lives but moved to act in such a dramatic, if self-destructive, fashion.

* * *

            O sublime Goddess! O naked oneness!

            What is the meaning of your nakedness?

            Are you shameless, Divine Lady?

            Yet even when discarding

            royal silks, and golden ornaments

            for earrings, bracelets, and anklets

            fashioned from human bone,

            you retain the dignity of bearing

            suited to the daughter of a king.[3]

In the video installation Ecstasy, (2001) two asynchronous videos follow the progress of a woman walking in a snowy and barren industrial lot. Presented on a glass shelf, the image on the left is projected on its surface from above, while on the right another image appears on an adjacent LCD which sits in a depression in the glass. The projected image on the left focuses on the woman’s journey, while the LCD images follow the ground, passing over the snow and the rocks and the stalks of dead grasses that crunch underfoot. The LCD image feels like a monitor – it operates the way our eyes scan the ground, like an extension of the self, a material sensor for where we are in the world. The projection, by contrast, feels like a narrative or a myth. It has the warm glow of the projected image, a reality even more ephemeral than the hardwired LCD screen.

We follow the image of the woman in the heavy coat and hood who emerges from the tall reeds. She tosses her hood back and loosens her coat to hang from her shoulders, and then to slide down her arms. She pulls the coat tightly around her, takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, then kneels down, pressing her forehead into the snow. She rolls on to her back, gathers fistfuls of snow on to herself, then spreads her arms and legs to make a snow angel.

We watch her get up, slip off her coat, carefully fold it and place it on the ground. She removes her gloves and boots, places them beside her coat and begins to walk again, untying her hair and shaking it out. She removes her dress, her tights and her underwear, and lies down on her side in the snow, where she remains motionless. The LCD on the right holds this image – an image of a reclining (or is it recumbent?) woman who is “nude” and who seems to have become part of the landscape, while the projected image frames from above a woman who is “naked,” lying in the snow, zooming in on the head, zooming out, zooming in again like the subject of some television homicide drama, then panning the ground and the milkweed pods and the sky to begin the loop again. On the right and left the images overlap at the point where the woman and the ground appear to have become one.

Presenting the two images on the shelf, Phillips makes this narrative at once mythic and intimate. She illustrates a story the way one might imagine it taking place. She illustrates the prosaic detail of the woman making a snow angel. She undresses – not in a theatrical manner, but as one would undress before bed, privately, at the same time folding clothes and putting them away. As spectators and voyeurs we lean over the table on which this story is played out for us, shifting our attention from left to right and back again, from the mythic narrative on the left to the physical detail – “what it known” – the discovery of a body, her neatly folded clothes, and the cold hard ground which has become the theatre for this final sleep.

As a eight year old child in Halifax, the report of the discovery of the body of a naked woman in a nearby wood lot profound impact on Phillips. Decades later she researched the unexplained death of Joyce Belliveau, a woman who, according to some accounts, was “known to take off her clothes.” Like Phillips’s protagonist in It’s about how people judge appearance, her mythic heroine in Ecstasy is pushed (or pushes) to the edge of her existence, the place where life and its absence are closest. If the former work makes reference to clinical self-inflicted violence and masochism, the latter is less clear. Is Joyce Belliveau the author of her demise, or a victim? Was her walk in the snow as Phillips imagined it, or is this just a convenient fiction fabricated to make a terrible reality comprehensible? Marginalised, dislocated, dispossessed, Phillips’s heroine is, perhaps, a woman who, abandoned by the world, simply returned to the earth.

            O Mother of the Universe,

            this child is terrified by your naked truth,

            your unthinkable blackness, your sheer infinity.

            Please cover your reality with a gentle veil.[4]

* * *

“It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity,’ a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, ‘oceanic’.”[5]

Windows, picture frames and video screens are portals between physical and psychic spaces. We look through windows to connect to other worlds. As a literary convention, the view from the window can establish the space for the first person narration of the memory of another time and place, or of a dream. So it is that Paulette Phillips’s video projection, The Floating House (2002), begins with the view of a bay as if one were looking out a kitchen window. Across the water, on a drizzly overcast day, a small clapboard house with a brand new cedar-shingled roof drifts into view. It passes in and out of the picture frame in a series of edits – sometimes closer, sometimes further away. A droning cymbal and voices – children and adults – and the chirping and squawking and barking of animals accompany the house on its voyage.

The image of the floating house engages two large metaphors of feeling. Houses, frequently the subject of children’s art, are often understood as a representation of the self. The representation of the house – its structure, functionality and stability – may be an indication of a fragmented or integrated personality and may reveal feelings of well being or fears of loss, exposure or dysfunction. Water can mean many things, but it is often symbolized as either a source of life or its all-consuming opposite – deep, dark and unfathomable nature. Water can trigger deep fears of engulfment, submersion and drowning. In Phillips’s work, water clearly plays both roles. A house floating on the water is both a dream and a disaster. It is a dream of freedom, of disembodiment – to float buoyantly, aimlessly, to be part of the world, to be in the world, but detached and above it at the same time. Rootless, adrift, the floating house is the ego in full flight from necessity, a meditative state perhaps, like that of a dervish, a feeling of eternity, like Rolland’s “oceanic” state to which Sigmund Freud makes reference.[6]

The house comes into closer focus and we can observe the details in the windows. The window coverings move in the wind in a ghostly fashion, as though someone is pulling them aside to look out, and we scour the windows anxiously for signs of life. The sound track suggests the sounds of a family life that may have once fill this home. The building lists forward perilously, as the water reaches up to the bottom of the window sash. The camera tracks around the structure and the gentle bobbing feeling gives way to a slow but powerful spinning. The water appears choppier, darker, menacing, and the windows begin to fill with water.

In the first part of the video, the house gently bobs across the bay. There is something magical and slightly absurd about this house that is cut loose from its foundations to be carried by the current. Quickly, however, the aimlessly drifting house appears to be have been sucked into a whirlpool. The water changes from buoyant and supporting to ravaging and consuming.

The absurdity of a house floating languidly in a bay calls to mind the similar, strangely beautiful absurdity of the woman in Ecstasy who removes her clothes to lie naked in the snow. Like the way we unconsciously touched our hand to our foreheads after watching It’s about how people judge appearance, we root for the little house, identify with it – feel a sinking feeling as we watch it fill up with water and discharge its human artifacts to float on the surface. It seems only natural to identify with it as a container of human feeling.

But for a brief moment all logic is suspended and we imagine that these things are not only possible, but also desirable. We are children again. We can cut loose our ties to the earth and drift away. We can shed our clothes and play naked in the snow. Then we are seized as Phillips’s protagonists are engulfed by their fate. We are consumed by their demise the way we are transfixed by any disaster, no matter where it takes place. We watch, not because we love to, but because we feel we must. We watch, because we are implicated as both conspirators and victims. We watch because we are part of this laboratory experiment. We watch because the creator and the destroyer demands it.

Is my Mother Kali really black?

People say Kali is black,

But my heart doesn't agree.

If She's black,

How can she light up the world?

Sometimes my Mother is white,

Sometimes yellow, blue, and red.

I cannot fathom Her.

My whole life has passed trying.

She is Matter,

Then Spirit,

Then complete Void.[7]

Gordon Hatt, 2004

Endnotes

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[1]. Cf. Among others Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image, Music, Text. Ed. and trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill, 1977, where it is suggested that a narrative is an ‘intransitive’ function, and that insofar as any meaning is to be made, it is made by the reader, not by the ‘author’.

[2]. Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics, 1975. <http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/OurBloodIII.html>.

[3]. Kali is "The hungry earth, which devours its own children and fattens on their corpses . . . It is in India that the experience of the Terrible Mother has been given its most grandiose form as Kali. But all this and it should not be forgotten is an image not only of the Feminine but particularly and specifically of the Maternal. For in a profound way life and birth are always bound up with death and destruction." Elizabeth U. Harding, Kali: The Black Goddess of Dakshineswar, Nicolas Hays: 1993. <http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/5229/kali/kali.html> and Rama Prasada, Devotional Songs: The Cult of Shakti, (1718-75), published in 1966 by Sinha Pub. Calcutta.

[4]. Ibid.

[5]. Sigmund Freud, citing his famous correspondence with Romain Rolland in Civilization and its Discontents, 1930. <http://www.freud.org.uk/religion6.html>.

[6]. Ibid.

[7]. Kamalakanta Bhattacharya (1769-1821).

That Obscure Object of Desire: A Group Exhibition of Visions of Delight, Fascination and Desire

"That Obscure Object of Desire" begins with the title of the 1977 Luis Bunuel film  the title being a point of departure for a collection of otherwise unrelated work. In Luis Bunuels film That Obscure Object of Desire, one man obsessively pursues the love of a young woman. The film is made strangely compelling by the fact that the director used two different and dissimilar women to play the leading role. In doing so, Bunuel generalized the object of his protagonist's love, making the focus of the film instead the character's obsessive behaviour and the shapeless and shifting identities of our objects of romantic longing.

It is said that the desire to connect goes back to the infant's separation from the mother's breast. From that grows a life-long search for love and the creation of a system of language and symbols to express that desire. Prose and poetry, music and art are inexact yet necessary means to evoke, however directly or obliquely, the goals of our longing. The works in this exhibition address fantasy, play, consumption, memory and mystery as identifiable characteristics of that obscure object of our desire.

Featuring work by Jane Adeney, Sara Angelucci, John Armstrong, Santo Barbieri, Dianne Bos, Gabrielle de Montmollin, Phil Delisle, Evergon, Lee Goreas, Catherine Heard, Clarissa Schmidt Inglis, Amelia Jimenez, Dan Kennedy, Anda Kubis, Kristiina Lahde, Bonnie Lewis, Joe Lima, Jennifer Linton, Gwen McGregor, Michael Morris, Lisa Neighbour, Reinhard Reitzenstein, Kris Rosar, Mona Shahid, Joanna Strong, Diana Thorneycroft, Philip Vanderwall, and Rhonda Weppler.

Exhibition runs from July 9 through August 14, 2004.  

ars longa, vita brevis

The installation of work of public art is a special moment, and for that we hold a small celebration and dedication. I would like to speak a bit about public art and how it is different from the domestic arts, those art works that we place in our homes or offices.

First of all – domestic art: easel paintings, watercolours, photographs, collages and montages, engravings and prints, glass and small cast sculpture, ceramics, needlework, found objects, action figures, Kinder Surprises, foreign money, postcards and greeting cards, fridge magnets . . . For all of the images I have a collected in my life I vainly try to find a place in my home. The most recent acquisitions find a prominent place in the living room or the study, the older pieces are relegated to a spare bedroom or hallway or stored in a closet, in a box. In my kitchen I hang posters and postcards and stick my son’s elementary school art work to the refrigerator – things that can be cleaned or thrown out or folded up and put away if damaged or no longer wanted. And in my bathroom, I try to find artwork that will withstand the dampness of the shower and perhaps articulate for me the romance of water and the banality of ablution.

Domestic art for me may be a little bit sentimental, recalling people I have known and worked with over the years, places I have been, or enthusiasms and interests that I have long since left behind. My domestic art might also be a charm, some dangling thing that is sweetly optimistic and speaks to my sunny side, or a talisman, a container for my fears and nightmares – an object that carries good luck, and wards off the bad.

What characterizes domestic art for me, however, is its temporality. We can change it according to our moods. We may acquire it impulsively, rearrange the furniture to accommodate it, paint the walls a different colour to frame it, then in a few months, or a year or two, grow tired of it. It gets knocked and jostled, acquires a wine stain from a party, a chip from the Nerf ball fight the boys had in the living room. The new girlfriend hates it. The old one takes it. Eventually it ends up in a garage sale. The life of an image begins again . . .

But a work of public art? Now that is a different life entirely. A work of public art is not an expression of personal taste or impulsiveness. Public art is a social activity from the beginning, the product of planning committees, juries, and advisory panels. The artist becomes a catalyst for the hopes and fears of the community. A public artwork may reflect a sentimental side or mark a milestone in the community’s history. In this way public art is not so different from its domestic cousin. The expression of the individual becomes the expression of the community.

Public art is different because it is made to endure, because the sun and the rain and the cold and the wind erode even stone over time. The surface must be resilient to withstand the probing and stroking of a million hands and the structure must be sound to support the climbing of a thousand children. Pubic art is made to endure the elements and in so doing, it lives a different life. We see it under different conditions. In the heat of the summer when we seek shelter from the sun and when shade seems hard to find, the artwork does not sweat. In the fall, when the wind blows cooler and the days begin to shorten, the artwork may begin to cast larger shadows, and glow in that peculiar orange light that I associate with autumn, and it will seem somehow strange that the artwork does not regret the passing of summer. In the winter, when we dress to ward off the cold, the artwork is naked but for a thin skein of snow or a decorative trim of icicles. It will appear to laugh at our frailty and our sensitivity to the cold. And in the spring it is new again, in those first warm sunny days, alongside the budding trees it shares that green and yellow light of the next growing season.

Carol Bradley's genius is to give what is durable – glazed and fired clay – the texture, sparkle and magic of lapping water, an image that is at once transitory and timeless. Where this artwork is placed, it won’t be climbed upon or receive the caresses of a million hands, but it will be there through the seasons and the years. In its position over the door I hope that it doesn't develop icicles. Carol has caught the blues, greens and turquoises we associate with a pool of water's colour refractions and she has given them back to us. In the summer when we are dry this Pool will signal the promise refreshment. In the winter, when we are cold, this Pool promises a tepid bath. For toddlers, Carol's Pool will always be associated with Water Babies, a first swim with a parent. For elementary school children, these colours and shapes will be associated with going to swimming lessons. For teenagers, this image of water will become a symbol of early romantic flirtations. For adults, the rippling surface of this artwork may come to represent the bittersweet discipline of regular physical exercise, or the pool lanes may become a symbol of a place of meditation and stress reduction from the burdens of work. Seniors will retain this image in connection with aquabics, the social life that this water activity affords them, and wonderful feeling of buoyancy that water can give to an aging body.

The life of this mural will span generations whose memories of home, family and friends will take place under this sign. Children will be born, grow into adults and eventually die, yet the blue, green and turquoise of Carol's mural will continue to lap and sparkle – a constant in our always changing lives.

ars longa, vita brevis (art is long, life is short)

Gordon Hatt, 2003

Interior Life: Paintings and Prints by Moira Clark

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.