The Self-Isolation Residency 1st June 2020: Day 64

Exploring Installation No. 8.4: 'Composition in White (Painting)',
501 Artist Residency, China 2011, Antony Clarkson

The line of light. So far I have talked a great deal about how ‘Composition in White (Painting)’ was influenced by my history as a painter, but today I would like to talk more about the stimuli that I was presented with in regards to the actual space that I worked with at 501 Art Space in Chongqing. The gallery space at 501 is very industrial and well it might be as it was built as a munition’s factory. 501 is not a street number as we would think of it in the west it is a designation number, if you ever come across any buildings designated as ‘501’ they would also have been munitions factories. On the whole the ‘texture’ of the space is rough and unfinished, almost brutalist in nature; however, there is something that softens and elevates the space.

High up along the back wall of the space are a series of six windows, they’re placed so high, over 10 feet off the ground, that it is impossible to actually see much out of them except sky and light. As usual when I started to consider how I would respond to this gallery space I spent an awful lot of time there getting to know the space; so much so that the curator just gave me a set of keys so that I could visit the space at any time I liked to help me to understand all of its moods. I of course took full advantage of this situation and found that when I went into the gallery very early in the mornings, before any one else was in the building, that there were actual 2 significant things that came in through these windows. The first of these was birdsong, the front of 501 opens out onto a busy main road full of traffic which becomes a night-market in the evening; but the back of the building, where the windows are situated ‘overlooks’, if that is the right word when you cannot see it, a garden full of plants and birds. For a while I did consider making a sound installation to reference this but there was actually something else coming through the windows which caught my attention even more significantly and in a way I guess it’s not great surprise that as a painter I was drawn towards the light!

In the early mornings, without the need for the artificial lights used later in the day, I became very conscious of how the line of ambient light spills into the space through these windows and illuminates the walls and floor (see photos). The height of the windows and angle of the light project beautiful images of the windows onto the floor of the space, but perhaps more importantly for me was the line of ambient light which illuminates the lower half of each end wall of the space at a very particular and attractive angle. It was finally this line of light drawn across the space which I decided to turn into concrete by way of ‘painting’ the space.