Exhibition News

Looking at when I last posted, no one could accuse me of overloading their inbox … but this is by way of alert for anyone in Edinburgh or Sheffield or possibly somewhere in between that a couple of my paintings have been selected for exhibitions there: ‘Time of her Life’ opened yesterday at The House of Smalls in Stockbridge (i.e. Edinburgh, for those of you from elsewhere), and runs till 27 October. ‘Dwelling’ opens at the Fronteer Gallery in Sheffield on 23 October and runs till 2 November.

The feature image at the top of this post is a detail of the mixed media painting that’s going to Sheffield; it’s called ‘The End of March’, and is a response to Elizabeth Bishop’s poem of the same title. In it, she describes finding a boarded up shed at the end of a long beach-walk, and imagines living there, doing nothing except reading long and boring books. I wrote about the poem in what became one of the chapters in a book I co-edited with Adam Hanna, Architectural Space and the Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), and getting permission to quote from it took over 18 months and a lot of sleepless nights. The painting was a bit of a liberation.

The one that’s going to Edinburgh is ‘Above the Quarry’ – a larger mixed media piece of a quarry face with a cluster of fragile white houses above it (probably most easily seen on my Instagram https://www.instagram.com/poet.and.cat/ at the moment, at https://www.instagram.com/p/C_0PwXxIWLm/?img_index=1). The Time of Her Life exhibition is about responses to menopause and peri-menopause, and I certainly didn’t have any sense when painting it that that was what this picture is about – but when I saw the call for submissions I realised that yes, it’s about hard-won and still precarious stability after what often feels like an awful lot of life. And that the energy of it is also very much to do with the sense of coming into one’s own and saying ‘I’m just DOING this’ – which in my case includes beginning to paint, & painting vigorously.

The relationship between painting and word is a curious one – I like the idea that the subject of a picture can be reinvented in the telling, but that the reinvention really just brings out what was unrealised, but nonetheless already there. The same happens with poems, in fact – but that’s another story.

Here are the links for anyone who might like to visit either exhibition (both of which look to be superb), or for anyone who’s just curious:

https://www.thehouseofsmalls.art

https://www.fronteer.co.uk