Accretia

TAKING SHAPE

Catalogue essay by Andrea Low

The Wooden Mansions is a grand name for a ramshackle structure, a barely held together synergy of parts. It’s a precarious propped up grid and within its arbitrarily defined spaces, is a perfunctory bricolage.

In the basement of the mansions, shelved against the walls in Claire van der Plas’studio, is an accretion; layers of painted and dismantled material stacked against the walls. The external coverings of the studio have been excavated to reveal a history book of paint, paper, plaster board, gib, wood. The history of the space is as legible as its visible surface. In some instances the material has been recycled as supports for further paintings; paintings of the interior.

Rhyming images and objects collide (quietly) in the small space. A sturdy staircase, with which we may be lazily familiar, glooms through the walls prefiguring the ultra orange balustrade jumping at you from a painting leaning nearby. It’s a disorienting strategy, one that blurs the fact and fiction of the building. The knowable is hard up against the spooky.

Taped drawings onto the roof, walls and windows imagine a vanishing point but no singular point of view that makes sense of every extended perspective.

Over the surface of the stack hovers the projected work. Image after image -a ghostly dossier of the passage of the walls and boards and painted surfaces as Claire has dismantled and assembled. Projected images overlay the actual and abstract. The past is visiting. Resurfacing.

Making and re-making: pairing past with present, doubling manifestations, coalescing momentum: then and now, then and now, then and now. Compressing time, the past, present and future are looped and play simultaneously. A smaller, intimate procession of images pays homage to the disinterred minutiae. A flip-book of acutely scrutinized pauses, documenting the fleeting.

Still, there’s no conclusive proof of the spaces’ incarnations. Evidence is circumstantial, but it does indicate intervention on an impressive DIY scale: crowbarred, stripped, laddered, marked, hammered, papered, hollowed, gouged, ripped, sanded, distressed, swept, taped, painted, wired and absented. The parameters are pre-determined but the work is adaptive, negotiating in and around the specifics, probing the space as interstice.

The phenomenological does not always coalesce with the actual no matter how aware you may be of the concrete features of the space. The recognition factor is distorted by the mass of data and the shifts in perception required to process it all.

The emptiness of the room is another factor so the faculties of memory and imagination must collude with the looking because there is a compulsion to complete the space somehow.

“Our sense of these things changes and they change,

Not as in metaphor, but in our sense

Of them. So sense exceeds all metaphor”

(Wallace Stevens ‘Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight’, The Collected Poems, Vintage books, 1990.)

Artist's Statement:

One day recently, quite out of the blue, a lady showed up in my studio who used to live in the building as a child. We walked around the building and she talked about when it was a boarding house –quite genteel –at the end of the Second World War.

After she’d left I continued working –and daydreaming:

Are the memories of all the people who’ve occupied this space in it’s hundred or so years like another dimension? One where the building could exist even after it’s eventually knocked down?

If so then there’s a dimension where it’s still a genteel boarding house, one where it’s home to railway workers, another where Colin McCahon teaches students to paint white eggs on a white plate –how many dimensions in all?

This room’s been a studio to art students for many years now. At the end of each year they paint the walls fresh white for their show.

It’s amazing how much you can do with just two tubs of white paint.

Every layer I painted was affected by the layer beneath. Unsealed surfaces like desktops, walls, and bits of old board insinuated their own histories into the paintings. Their pasts seeped through the whiteness and corrupted its uniformity. Made it interesting. Some of them will be nailed back onto the walls and painted over when I’m finished -white of course.

How many layers of white paint are there already on these walls? Is each layer of white paint all that’s left of the student who occupied the space for a year? Or are there other traces? Does the building have a memory?

Here I go again -must’ve been reading too much Bachelard, all that daydreaming in corners.

But it was daydreams, and trying to make paintings that induce them, trying to invite the viewer to generously supplement the painted facts that got me onto painting the building in the first place. First I combined a pattern resembling wallpaper with an illusionistic extension of the space, and then I dispensed with the pattern. I thought it focused too much attention on the technological means, not enough on the imaginative means.

The productive imagination –the work of the viewer after the painter has finished –that’s really interesting to me.

When you look at a piece of painted pipe and a piece of real pipe together, are you forming a picture -creating something new?

Is that something space? What kind of space? Are there different kinds? How many clues does it take to create an imaginary space? Just how few clues can you be given and still make some kind of picture? Who makes the image, me or you or both of us?

How much does what you see depend on what you’re looking for?

How much does what you’ve seen before affect how you see now?

These are some of the questions I tried to ask through the paintings when they were painted on the walls and floor and ceiling.

In some ways I feel like I’ve made it too easy for you now, showing you these projections, which contain the painted space and the real space already combined. The illusions work too well when it’s all flattened down to two dimensions.

Then again, projecting onto this pile of boards adds the third dimension back in. And the fourth.

Now there are different puzzles; more complex ones than merely finding the right spot in the room to make an illusion work.

There’s figuring out where it all went, what it showed as a picture, what it hid as a panel, what it revealed when it was taken down.

There’s deciding what marks were made deliberately, what was already here before I came, what was added, what removed? And when?

The spatial games have changed so they offer glimpses of impossible spaces at different scales, but can’t be resolved into a simple illusion.

There’s a lot more freedom for the productive imagination –and a lot more work for it to do.

Which leaves me with some of the basic questions, maybe more like doubts, which tend to come back to me:

Is this a painting? Yes.

Is it finished? Yes. No.

Yes, for now.

No, because it will change in your memory and mine. Yes, because it’s doing what I want it to do, asking the questions I want to ask. Yes because it’s time to stop and give the room to the next imagining being, after adding the next layer of white paint.

When you’ve finished looking and the exhibition time is over I’ll have to return the room to the way I found it. I signed the paper, promised I would. After all the dismantling the room will be mantled again. Uniformly white, cloaked in anonymity. A fresh page for a fresh student.

Will it occur to them to think ‘what’s under the whiteness’?