Painting as Opening

Orientation: Painting as Opening
My painting practice opens my world. It offers a place where strands of distributed psyche gather momentarily; their traces taking fragile form before continuing inward and outward again.

Distributed Psyche
Before she died, we shared parts of our psyches. What does a seven year old do with all the loosed strands that no longer speak the way they used to? I’d like to say that she cared for them in their new form, but I think she turned her back in guilt. However, attention to tending the dead did become, and remains part of my art practice. Many years later, when Patrick, my husband, father of my children and artistic partner died, untangling the shared strands of psyche was more of an overt process. In the end, energy dissipated from some things we’d shared, was sustained and perhaps re-ignited other things we shared, and emerged in entirely new things. Before he died, I asked him if he thought it possible to have a collaborative relationship with someone who was dead. His response was a flat ‘no’. I think he wanted me to focus on the living. Perhaps he just wanted his freedom in the other world. So, psyche, for me, doesn’t feel contained solely within the individual. It seems to emerge in relation to and through interaction with other people, landscapes, animals. When we make paintings (any artform) there is the possibility that we pick up strands of this distributed psyche, and enter into its web. The same when we encounter an artwork.

Fragments
Fragments are not incomplete works but nodes of emergence or encounter. No single work or medium contains the whole; each holds sufficient strands of a wider unfolding to stand independently while remaining connected.

Distributed Form: Constellation
Works emerge as fragments across painting, writing, ritual, and drawing. These fragments cluster into constellations: temporary formations of relation that appear through recurrence, variation, and delayed recognition. No single work contains the whole, and the practice does not seek an overall image. Meaning gathers across works through proximity and time, allowing connections to appear without consolidation. Constellations shift, disperse, and reform, remaining open to future emergence.

Context: Painting Before, Then and Later
I easily slip into other worlds; into the imaginal realm of reality. The magical landscape shone brightly until the death of my best friend when we were both seven. The underworld, mitigated by love, inched itself in. Painting, before, then and later, offered a pre-organisational organising environment for all that spills outside the meaning-making machinery.

Distributed Time
Time within the practice does not follow ordinary chronological structure. During painting, attention intensifies and multiple temporalities become present together; immediate action, accumulated memory, dream residue, and future recognition operating simultaneously. This distributed time brings heightened clarity and concentration. Awareness remains alert while holding several registers at once. Understanding often arrives later, as works become familiar through return and renewed encounter. Periods of waiting, stillness, and delay sit alongside active phases within this extended temporality, through which the practice unfolds. I imagine painting time’s patterns to exist mathematically, perhaps visualised as almost-geometric forms in some kind of magical landscape.

Withdrawal and Fallow Periods
After a body of work holds, withdrawal follows. Periods of stillness, exhaustion, or illness form part of the practice, allowing reorganisation beneath visible activity. Dreams accompany and contribute throughout the process.

Entry Through Receptivity
Making often begins through receptive procedures that loosen intentional control; decalcomania, parsemage, receptive drawing, planchette work, and ritual or visualisation enacted prior to material engagement. These approaches open conditions in which emergence precedes intention. Writing, ritual, drawing, collage, and painting operate through related procedures of receptivity and attunement, existing as fragments within the same field of practice.

Risk and Vulnerability
Making often begins by stepping into conditions that exceed my current capacity to perceive or organise clearly. Early stages can feel uncertain or disorienting because relations have not yet become audible. Clarity develops gradually through continued attention, as attunement allows emerging structures to be sensed. Vulnerability arises through remaining present with what cannot yet be understood, resisting premature resolution while fragile connections form. Moments that initially appear unsuccessful or unresolved may later reveal themselves as necessary beginnings within the wider unfolding of the work.

Attunement at the Surface
Attention gathers at the painting surface, experienced as a threshold where relations become locally perceptible. A gentle movement of adjustment occurs between myself and the painting through listening, pausing, and response. Conceptual thinking recedes while multiple registers remain active without synthesis.

Distributed Body
In painting I give a particular kind of attention to the body (mine or someone else’s) so that it opens as a place for psyche to register, or perhaps I realise psyche’s place is in the body. During painting, I am aware of a relation between body and psyche that emerges as pressures and orientations, sometimes sensed in different organs or regions before finding form materially. Sensation, attention, breath, and material response gather locally through the body while remaining part of a wider field of relations. The body participates alongside material, surface, and environment. Perhaps an attunement occurs through pressure, pacing, rhythm, and shifts of energy. Periods of exhaustion or illness often accompany transitions, seeming changes of direction within the work, marking transformation in the wider painting process rather than interruptions to it.

Modes of Consciousness
Making unfolds through shifting modes of attention: receptive openness, attuned responsiveness in which micro-decisions arise without deliberate planning, and periods of increased shaping awareness through which matter finds its form. These modes seem to oscillate rather than progressing sequentially.

Emergence of Form
Forms emerge gradually from seeming chaos through layering, interruption, erasure, and return. Imagery may appear unexpectedly: Figures, landscapes, bodies, animals, or ambiguous presences arrive. Recognition remains suspended during some passages of making.

Distributed Cognition
Before, during and after painting, I experience many different ways of knowing and almost-knowing. These multiple cognizing processes unfold across time in relation to material, body, perception, attention, intuition, imagination, encouraging a kind of meaning making that sometimes may never fall into words.

Distributed Ambulation
The practice unfolds through movement between elements organised and pre-organised as webs. Each return to one element (in relation to its others) revisits similar and different conditions; shifting concentration and orientation.

Reciprocal Transformation
Painting allows dispersed strands to find temporary alignment in matter, while the material work participates in releasing those transformations back into the wider field and into the interior.

Encounter and Recognition
The paintings create conditions in which recognition may arise; moments that feel familiar without requiring explanation. Understanding develops through proximity and time rather than immediate comprehension.

Holding and Resolution
A painting resolves when relations sustain themselves sufficiently for intervention to cease. Individual works begin to hold first, followed gradually by a body of work. Resolution does not produce certainty; familiarity develops later through return and encounter.

Landscape
Paintings often orient themselves toward landscape, even when figurative intention precedes them. Landscape appears not as depiction but as spatial condition; a field within which relations unfold. Forms emerge as if within an environment rather than placed upon a surface, allowing movement, distance, and proximity to coexist without fixed hierarchy.

Letting Go
When a painting resolves I take it off the wall and prop it where I can see it. After a couple of weeks, I turn the canvas round so I can’t see it. A few weeks after that I put it round the corner so that I know it’s there but I can’t see it.  A few weeks more and it goes into storage.  After that it is free to make its own way in the world and take on new identities.

Exchange and Expansion
When a work enters another life through encounter or acquisition, the relational field expands to include another cluster of nodes, allowing the work to continue unfolding through new relations. Exchange forms part of the ongoing circulation of the practice.

Attunement
Making, stopping, dreaming, recognising, and returning form interwoven movements within an ongoing practice of receptive attunement. This understanding remains provisional. The practice continues to change through making, withdrawal, encounter, and return. Undoubtedly, new relations will emerge that exceed current articulation, allowing the constellation to expand over time. The work continues.