Exhibition at Coventry Point February
2018
Curator - Herminone
Yesota
Artist - Mark Stammers, paintings
& photos
For
a residency artists often use the time look back and forwards balance their
point of view. Would you have a special reason for wanting to show this
painting now?
These are paintings from 1995 – 2000 – very small, some of
them, I started making these after a performance artist visited my painting
room and suggested that perhaps I should try small painting, liking figures
located in one small corner of a much larger painting.
A remark that gave me to reconsider the scale of painting,
these small paintings are a response to that romantic idea, evolving of senses
involved in the exploration of identity and self. As these collected I devised
the idea of travelling these around the coast of the Uk on a tour tracing the
outline of the coast line. The small scale meant the 50 or so paintings could
be packed in two suit case sized boxes, making for a very possible development.
But why stop there I decided to expand the tour to cover the coast line of the
EU, making for an even longer touring event.
The outline traced by the works around the coasts form a
conceptual counterpart to the abstract imagery, making for a very large
drawing, two synchronised extremes…partly hoping to tour with other artists
working with theatre this was how these works developed into the exhibition
that they make.
As soon as the idea gelled the development slowly began to be
dogged by difficulties, computer with the planning preparations stolen, and
filling in of ever more obstacles, writing to get funds led to zero support for
the tour, but the plan has never been unpresent from my current activities, only
delayed. So today’s exhibition is the first time that they have been properly shown
in any number.
-
- Just now with the British leaving the dominant
core of the EU, the Brexit ruction, these painting are right at the centre of
change.
- - Non
vocal, sub vocal imagery is where languages are levelled, and makes for the
real significance of this exhibition.
A small brochure I made for the show in the 90’s touched on
this…. I showed one draft to test the idea with an older resident living nearby
whom I knew…. his reply after reading about the tour was phlegmatic – “I’m
British” that was all he said. Later I realised that where I had written City
he had thought I meant Coventry, but that was not what I had written nor meant.
-
So
this is how the idea of the coastal touring exhibition evolved, moving around
the outlines of the coasts as if drawn by a pencil from the sky.
The idea was to pack the paintings into just two suitcases to
travel lightly and easily. I had originally intended to just travel on holiday
around the UK coast with an artist friend, but my experience of applying for
MA’s was something instructive: Coventry had turned my painting down,
Birmingham turned my painting down, but at Winchester a professor of painting
Prof Hunter accepted my painting with an offer to join the European MA course.
The first Uni was mostly directed by gender politics, the second Uni was mainly
pattern and design at the time. So I widened the plan to travel the EU coasts
too.
Applications for funding made at the time were unsuccessful
and I concluded that I would be alone in this, as fund holder’s interests were
not to support. And now matters can only be more impossible.
So today is a real is a victory for this exhibition that has
been delayed so long, after a long trail of distractions and distresses.
-
Your
brochure says in a celebratory mood, that at the completion of the tour the
paintings were to be shared by different capitals, making for a cultural élan
of a sort. You brought the paintings here packed inside a single Daler Rowney
box, still there from the original plan, is it likely to go on from here?
Hopefully, but at present my free time is very little, good
commissions are sparse and the ‘vicissitudes of Life’ as Freud would say, something
one can only understand as one gets older. New paintings and a sculpture trail piece are in process along with tutoring and a shortish residency.
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