The Self-Isolation Residency 27th may 2020: Day 59

Exploring Installation No. 8.1: 'Composition in White (Painting)',
501 Artist Residency, China 2011, Antony Clarkson

Tonight I would like to begin a post that I might well return to tomorrow or in a couple of days. I'm thinking about doing this because it was a very important piece of installation for me and I would really like to have the opportunity to explore it, it's heritage and it's influence on other pieces of my work in perhaps more depth that I have with other pieces so part in this blog. The piece is called 'Composition in White (Painting)' and it was created exclusively for the 501 Art Space Gallery in Chongqing China whilst I was their artist in residence on the summer of 2011. I applied for the residency at 501 whilst I was still taking part in the residency at Cow House Studios in Ireland; this was a very important developmental time for my work and I was fortunate to be selected for a number for excellent artist residencies from  2010 - 2013 which gave me the time and space to explore a variety of ideas inherent in my work.

Although this is a piece of installation and it actually involves be paint in its composition I chose to entitle the piece 'Composition in White (Painting)'. This reference to 'painting' in the title of the piece is where I have decided to begin to talk about it in my post this evening. When I studied for my BA at Manchester School of Art the title of the course that I completed was Fine Art (Painting); to differentiate it from Fine Art (Sculpture) and Fine Art (Printing) which were the other 2 portions of the Fine Art Course that students could study. In theory, although I was part of the school of 'Painting' I was also part of the wider School of Fine Art, which should have meant that there was a certain amount of 'flexibility' in the boundaries of the work we made as students and how it 'should' be received by our Lecturers. It has to be said that this attitude did not really exist in practice in the same way that it did in theory and the 3 separate schools tended on the whole to remain aloof and rigid. I say this as though this was a problem and that it adversely affected my work, but in actuality that wasn't true. 

In the second half of my first year of study I became preoccupied with the idea of creating what might be considered to be an 'immersive' painting which would totally surround the observer, to put them at the centre of it. This was the beginning of my 'spatial paintings' which you can probably see (below) also had an influence of this piece. Whilst I was working on this painting I was fortunate enough to catch the interest of Prof. Keith Brown who was at that time Head of the Sculpture Department at Manchester School of Art, he and I spent a great deal of time considering the 'painting' I was making and its alternative relationships to Painting, Sculpture and to another potential area referred to as 'objecthood'. I remember Keith coming into my studio and seeing the piece for the first time and knowing I was a painter making the comment, "you know what you've got there don't you? That's a sculpture" said with his tongue embedded firmly in his cheek! But in this way I made the connections between painting and sculpture which helped to develop my onward thinking,

All of these thoughts were part of my thinking process as I stretched the six 'canvases' for 'Composition in White (Painting)' and so the painting reference exists within the piece.