I’m taking baby steps right now in getting back into the studio and finding my way into working. My comfort zone starts with the familiar, so I’ve been rooting through the objects, tools, materials, bits of paper, cuttings and collectables that one could call my studio toolbox… I found a file from my MA research 8 years ago – an A-Z of artists doing work that in some way related to my own at the time. Fascinating. (I could easily lose myself for hours in this!).
The article on Lenore Tawney goes back way further than that (the stamp on the photocopy from the British Library is dated 1990). Lenore was a contemporary and friend of Agnes Martin, the minimalist artist I wrote my BA thesis/book on, so I looked at her work then and was struck by both the scale and the intricacy of it. Her work spanned the gap between ‘Art’ and ‘Craft’ at the time – the work she was most known for were huge hanging pieces – veils of delicately-woven threads, full of movement and soft energy, with their own enticing vocabulary of ripples and squiggles, like a kind of handwriting.
On the same theme, her smaller work also interests me – much of it exploring scripts, handwriting and written language, all themes I have explored to some degree in my own work.
I don’t have the title for this piece, but I love the texture of it, the rich layers, the shadows, the rhythms, the intricacies of it…
Food for thought as always…