In February 2013, I exhibited two triptychs, Rose and Undergrowth (2012), at Chelsea FutureSpace in London, as part of SURFACE, an exhibition exploring the relationship between an artwork’s physical surface and the ideas, processes and materials that give it meaning.

Conceived by curators Daisy McMullan and Kate Ross (now Kate Eleanor Greenspon), the exhibition brought together eight artists working across painting, collage, drawing, textiles, digital imagery and objects. It was an especially sympathetic context for my work, which explored the possibilities of painting through digitally composed imagery, printed silk and constructed surfaces.

The exhibition followed my participation in Detours at Wimbledon Space in 2012, where I had met Daisy. It became another important encounter in a developing conversation about painting, materiality and the boundaries between fine art, craft and design.

When the Surface Becomes the Subject

The curatorial premise of SURFACE was particularly interesting to me because it addressed a question that had occupied much of my practice: what happens when the physical surface of a painting refuses to disappear behind the image?

In conventional painting, the canvas is often treated as a neutral support. Yet every material has its own character, behaviour and associations. Silk receives colour differently from paper or canvas; digital processes allow images to be repeated, mirrored and reconfigured; and a work assembled from several panels creates relationships between its individual parts and the larger composition.

My triptychs Rose and Undergrowth were made using silk, polyester and wood. Each measured 117 × 66 cm and combined digitally developed patterns with the material qualities of printed cloth. Their compositions suggested botanical forms while moving towards abstraction, with repetition, colour and changing visual rhythms connecting the panels.

Although these works employed textile materials and processes, I understood them as paintings. The printed surface was not simply a vehicle for an image. Its material properties participated in the image’s construction and meaning.

The exhibition catalogue considered pattern, repetition, texture, patina and materiality as ways of exploring the relationships between fine art, craft and design. These were precisely the boundaries I had been questioning through my own practice.

A Different Curatorial Conversation

I exhibited alongside Brian Chalkley, Edward Cotterill, Vanessa Hodgkinson, Charlotte Jonerheim, Sanghyun Kim, Kangwook Lee and Mohammad Namazi.

Their work approached the idea of surface through strikingly different methods: collage, painting, digital imagery, assemblage, drawing and even the burning of paper. The exhibition brought these approaches together without requiring them to share a single medium or visual language.

I particularly enjoyed exhibiting alongside Brian Chalkley, Professor of Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art, and artists associated with Chelsea’s fine-art community. It was a lovely gallery setting and an opportunity to see my work in a different artistic context.

The exhibition was also interesting because it was not confined to a conventional gallery environment. Chelsea FutureSpace occupied part of the entrance foyer of a residential development at Grosvenor Waterside. In her contemporary account of the exhibition, Kate Ross described the challenge of arranging artworks on movable walls in a space through which residents and visitors continued to pass.

Looking back, I find that setting particularly revealing. My paintings were beginning to enter architectural environments where art, design and everyday life were already in conversation. This relationship between artwork and surrounding space would become increasingly important in my later installations.

The Curatorial Relationship

The invitation to participate in SURFACE grew out of my earlier encounter with Daisy McMullan through Detours, an exhibition of artists undertaking residencies through the national Artists Access to Art Colleges programme.

At Wimbledon Space, I had exhibited silk-based paintings alongside digital animations. At Chelsea FutureSpace, two of those paintings entered a different conversation, one concerned specifically with surface and its relationship to artistic meaning.

Daisy and Kate’s curatorial interests were closely aligned with questions I was exploring in my own work. Rather than separating painting, textiles and design into distinct categories, SURFACE considered what might happen when these practices were brought together through their shared attention to material, process and visual language.

The exhibition also formed part of a wider network around CHELSEA space, directed by Donald Smith. The Chelsea Arts Club Trust and the Ashley Family Foundation supported curatorial research fellowships that helped emerging curators develop exhibitions and publications. Through these relationships, artistic and curatorial ideas could move between educational institutions, galleries and independent practice.

My collaboration with Daisy continued later that year when we co-curated The Geometrics, an exhibition concerned with the methods, materials and thinking behind contemporary creative practice. In retrospect, SURFACE was an important point of connection between these projects.

Works in Continuance

What interests me now is that the paintings themselves did not need to change in order to be understood differently.

At Detours, they formed part of an exploration of digital animation, pattern and artistic experimentation. At SURFACE, their material construction and relationship to fine-art practice came into sharper focus. Each exhibition brought forward a different aspect of the same developing body of work.

I increasingly understand artistic development in this way: not as a sequence of replacements, but as an accumulation of materials, techniques, encounters, places and relationships that remain capable of being reactivated.

SURFACE gave my early triptychs a particularly clear context. It also demonstrated something I have come to recognise throughout my practice: an artwork can acquire new possibilities through the company it keeps, even when its physical form remains unchanged.

Exhibition

SURFACE
Chelsea FutureSpace, Hepworth Court, Grosvenor Waterside, London
13 February – 14 April 2013 (original published dates)

Exhibition concept and design: Daisy McMullan and Kate Ross (now Kate Eleanor Greenspon).

Participating artists: Brian Chalkley, Edward Cotterill, Vanessa Hodgkinson, Charlotte Jonerheim, Sanghyun Kim, Kangwook Lee, Mohammad Namazi and Emma Neuberg.

Works exhibited:

Rose, 2012. Mounted triptych in silk, polyester and wood, 117 × 66 cm.

Undergrowth, 2012. Mounted triptych in silk, polyester and wood, 117 × 66 cm.

Further information: The Culture Capital Exchange — SURFACE at Chelsea FutureSpace.