The Shield Paintings began as a relatively small body of work, shown during Open Studios at Textiles Hub London. At the time, I presented them primarily as new paintings for visitors to encounter in the studio. Looking back, I see them as something more particular: a transitional group of works made after Drapes and before the large-scale investigations that developed through my Lincoln City Fellowship in Los Angeles.
They also marked a return to painting as a concentrated object.
After working with expanses of printed cloth that occupied architectural space, I wanted to make something visually immediate and contained. I chose circular canvases because the circle seemed capable of doing something that the conventional rectangle could not. It concentrated the image. There were no corners towards which the composition could dissipate. Pattern, gesture and colour were held within a continuous edge.
The paintings became objects with a strong physical presence: part painting, part sign and, increasingly in my mind, part shield.
The Circle as Shield
The title Shields emerged from my interest in protection.
A shield establishes a boundary between the body and something approaching it. It receives, blocks and deflects. Its surface faces outward while protecting what lies behind it, making impermeability as important to its meaning as appearance.
The association also carried me back to Greek mythology and the story of Perseus and Medusa. Perseus cannot safely meet Medusa’s gaze directly. Instead, Athena’s polished shield enables him to approach her through reflection. The shield becomes more than defensive armour: it is an intermediary surface through which a dangerous encounter can be transformed.
I find that idea increasingly interesting in relation to painting.
A painting is also a surface positioned between an internal and external world. Experience can enter it without being reproduced literally. Conflict can become colour; anxiety can become pattern; vulnerability can acquire an edge. The work does not need to disclose the circumstances from which it arose in order to retain their emotional pressure.
The Shield Paintings developed from a period in which questions of protection, authorship and recognition had become particularly present for me. I had experienced the unsettling sensation of seeing aspects of a visual language I had developed circulate in circumstances in which I felt unable to speak openly about my own contribution. Rather than narrating that experience directly, I began to concentrate certain characteristics of my work within the paintings themselves.
The shield therefore became both protection and assertion: a surface upon which a visual identity could be made intensely visible.
A Language Returning
Formally, the paintings brought together elements that had appeared at different points in my practice.
Dots, gestural marks and expressionistic shapes recalled earlier pastel drawings, while some of their graphic qualities connected to the drawings I had developed around Cloud Buds and The Democratic Dish. Rather than treating those earlier works as completed episodes, I found myself drawing upon their visual vocabulary again.
I also imposed a deliberately restricted colour palette.
This was a discipline I knew well from textile design, where limiting colour can create greater coherence across a collection and force more precise decisions about relationships between hue, scale and pattern. Applied to painting, the same constraint had a different effect. Colour became concentrated, and the circular boundary intensified the relationships taking place within it.
In this sense, the Shield Paintings are another example of what I now understand by Painting into Textiles & Back Again. Knowledge acquired through textile design returned to painting, while painterly marks accumulated through earlier drawings and projects were reorganised within a new form.
The movement was not linear. It was recursive.
After Drapes
Their position immediately after Drapes now seems significant.
Drapes had allowed painting to leave the conventional wall, becoming cloth, suspension, architecture and atmosphere. The Shield Paintings appear at first to do almost the opposite. They contract that expanded field into individual, bounded objects.
But I no longer see contraction and expansion as opposites.
The experience of making Drapes changed the way I approached the smaller paintings that followed. The boundary of a painting had become something I could question consciously. In Drapes, the edge could disperse into architecture; in Shields, I made the edge emphatic.
The circle contains.
The shield protects.
The painting holds its ground.
What interested me was not a return to painting as though the intervening experiments had never happened, but what painting might become after those experiences had entered it.
Recognition
There is another meaning of the word recognition that has become important to me when thinking about these works.
Recognition can mean public acknowledgement or attribution, but it also describes the moment at which something becomes identifiable: I recognise that hand. I recognise that rhythm. I recognise that way of using colour.
For an artist, a visual language develops slowly. It accumulates through decisions repeated, abandoned and rediscovered over years. It can exist across very different materials without depending upon a single medium.
The Shield Paintings allowed me to bring aspects of that language into unusually concentrated focus. Their repeated circular format, restricted palettes, dots, fragments and graphic gestures created a family resemblance between individual works without requiring them to become identical.
They asserted difference through recurrence.
Perhaps that was another kind of protection: not the attempt to prevent a visual language from travelling, which may ultimately be impossible, but the continuing development of that language until its relationships and histories become increasingly visible.
A Developmental Chapter
For some time I regarded the Shield Paintings as a relatively contained chapter between larger projects. I am less certain of that now.
I have begun returning to them quietly.
That return interests me because it connects directly to what I have come to call Works in Continuance. Artistic development does not necessarily require one body of work to supersede another. A work can recede from view while remaining available. An unresolved form, colour relationship or material question can wait until another moment makes it active again.
The Shield Paintings sit between the architectural expansion of Drapes and the subsequent investigations into scale, repetition, digital transformation and environment that developed through my Lincoln City Fellowship. Yet they do not simply occupy a point on a timeline between the two.
They remain part of the practice.
Returning to the circle now does not mean returning to the same place. I approach it carrying everything that has happened since.
This is increasingly how I understand an artist’s journey: not as a succession of styles to be discarded and replaced, but as a continuing accumulation of forms, materials, techniques, encounters and histories that remain capable of being reactivated.
The shield, it seems, was never quite a full stop.
Open Studios
Shield Paintings
Textiles Hub London
London
Circular paintings in oil and acrylic.
First presented during Open Studios as a new body of work exploring the circle as painting, sign and protective form.
Pictured Emma Neuberg, Desert, oil on canvas, 70cm x 70cm x 2cm, 2018. Photo: © 2018 Emma Neuberg. All rights reserved.