Written on the Body

The gravity of the body occurs to me in my almost 7 decade frame. Its weight and what it might mean.

Studying the figure began in my teens with life drawing that continued into university, art college then teaching.

When asked to look at the female figure eventually I drew eyes replacing nipples, irises and roses as vaginas. Representing the female body was politic and poetic five decades ago.

In pandemic times the focus on our bodies is paramount. I find myself pondering how now to represent the figure from which I with-drew.

Past days drawing cadavers and bones in anatomy class brought me into the subcutaneous body’s insults, wounds and diseases.

Now when I look it’s the skin I see and what it wears. It can represent the intensity of bodily love, the body giving birth, the end of the body through age.

Back to the problematics of it. Jeanette Winterson’s texts have crept in subcutaneously and I credit their value to this body of work.

Reconstructed Paintings

Wax, pigments, oil paint and objects

Various dimensions

These sculptures are articulated from the scraping process involved in my 2-d work. They are the remains of the day. No longer detritus. Using every bit not wasting.

INFINITE GRADATION

This body of work is based upon Anne Michaels’ book of poetry Infinite Gradation. #anne michaels. Also the poet’s collaboration with david sereda #david sereda and the Stray Dog Salon which has brought voice and sound to the words.

THE STONES OF FLORENCE

The Stones of Florence series arises out of a 50 year history with the Italian city - as a traveller, student, artist, teacher, researcher, and lover. Named for Mary McCarthy’s book, following John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, who walked the streets as have I. These paintings and digital prints, made from the rocks, stones, and earth of Florence and the Etruscan hill town of Fiesole, are my stories. The pigments, suspended in wax, are absorbed by the ground of marble dust collected in the hills of Carrara.

COUNTERPAIN

Childhood memories of confinement to bed due to illness - mother as well as me – return in adulthood during periods of unwellness. Books were a way out of the tedium of endless days and nights living under covers. British imperialist literature included. Scottish writers were appropriate for children and later the Irish who weren’t. As an immigrant, Canadian writers only came with schooling. Women writers even later and anything non-Anglo a far cry away.

A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson contained the poem “The Land of Counterpane” about a boy’s imaginary world while convalescing in bed. A starting point. As an adult, a project emanated out of The Yellow Wallpaper, again containing vivid imagery about the experience of being confined to small spaces and the effect upon the imagination.

This work is about the small but infinite world of being in a particular place much of the time with little movement and variation. Almost a tedium. Except for the capacity to see and record. And then the process of translating the recorded images into something that externalizes the internal experience into a tangible visual result.

Wax embeds and protects, coats and preserves, deepens and adds dimension to the instant photography of the cell phone camera. These images are intimate and page sized. Like a book. Each is visual poem in which I lived. This is what happens when the internal eye is open while the eyelids are closed.

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NUCLEAR GARDEN

Developed in the early 1990's and exhibited from 1993 and '98 in public galleries throughout the province, this multi-media body of work was motivated by the community of Port Hope, Ontario, its relationship to the local nuclear power industry and disposal of low-level radioactive waste. Addressed through paintings, reprography and videotapes, the use of appropriative strategies links the nuclear landscape to the history of landscape depiction. Rembrandt, Constable, Turner and Monet are translated into sites such as Darlington, Pickering and Wellesleyville nuclear plants and their environs. Issues of power, the loss of childhood and paradise, and terrible beauty arise. A catalogue with essays by Stuart Reid, Terrence Heath and David Macfarlane accompanies this body of work.

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PRIMARY YELLOW

Art School (Dismissed) features a site-specific work, Primary Yellow, about the imaginary that arises out of reading.

Closely related to a recent body of Michèle White's work Yellow Wallpaper (based on the novella by Charlotte Perkins Gillman), Primary Yellow involves a two and three-dimensional pattern and image collaboration arising out of the teacher-student relationship.

Amanda Clyne, Christofer Hutch, Nitasha McKnight, Erin Parton and Rebecca Simonetti are all graduates of the Thesis Program in Drawing & Painting at the Ontario College of Art & Design, in which Michèle teaches. They are exhibiting artists with a strong interest in site-specific work, the interrogation of the digital, the primacy of the hand, the language of materiality, and the reign of the imagination as the environment in which invention co-inspires.

They collaborated as students, we as teacher/students over a number of years. OCAD has offered each of us the immense pleasure of developing meaningful exchanges throughout a rich curriculum. It culminated in an intensive body of studio production accompanied by a supporting written document evidencing research and methodology.

I have asked them to return to the site where my adult children once attended primary school (and even earlier the Drop-In Centre for preschoolers.) The Shaw School is where my son and daughter made their first paintings independent of their mother, where I volunteered in classes teaching colour, materiality and drawing, where we parents designed and made sets for their elaborate theatrical and musical performances. Creativity in reading and writing, music and drama, and the visual arts thrived in the Shaw School of our memory. The rich arts community surrounding the school, including its many parents and graduates over more than a century and a quarter, resulted in a dynamic and engaged centre of learning and culture in downtown Toronto.

This is a memory now. The site has been closed. The more efficient, smaller, modern Givens School occupies the rear end of the historical building, soon to be reabsorbed into the community under the auspices of Artscape. This reprieve makes Art School (Dismissed) a celebration of revitalization, rather than the occupancy of haunted hallways.

How better to reface a structure of edification than to set a merry band of liberated students to play on the memory-marked surfaces of my/our past? The continuum of education, ever shifting and changing, is the playground of invention.

We colonize a classroom corner, windows and a wall in the production of a group creative experience, after school is out. The result is a reading space, which provides permission for the imagination to expand from the page to the environment.

The erratic nature of memory colours our desires and fantasies, for better and for worse. We tint the past and digitize the future through filters, layers and other variables. Yellow sits between extremes, illuminating or infecting. We invite you to bask in its glow and to stew in its juices.

Primary experiences intersect with distant sensory stimuli, resulting in complex assemblies of imagery. What we once saw and read becomes integrated with what we absorb now. All we have seen is entailed in the moment of seeing and in what we project as we practice seeing. We have assembled, for your reading, our playful and difficult moments arising out of shared texts. 

The floor invites the reader to sit, to access the bookshelves, to curl up and read, perchance to dream.

The shelves are full of books of knowledge, covered in the richness of figured yellow papers. Charlotte Perkins Gillman is uncovered. The cupboard, at the suggestion of our boy participant, is full of contraband, confiscated from errant readers. 

The full flight of windows blooms with Christofer's progressions of geometric and organic pattern, in whole and fragmented. Transparent and translucent filigree transforms the interior of the classroom figuring the floor with shadow and reflection.

The girls wreak havoc on the bulletin board. Reading runs rampant in their hands, full of toys I have coated in yellow wax. Amanda, Nitasha, Erin and Rebecca play with two and three-dimensional props in explications of their ruminations on reading. All avid cultural consumers and commentators, their emanations are illustrations of the power of the imagination in the hands of the eagerly educated and the buoyantly demonstrative. 

It has been my great pleasure to be a pet teacher of theirs. 

Michèle White
May 2010

PLANET

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YELLOW WALLPAPER: An Introduction by Gillian Mackay

Not long ago, no serious artist would have dared to place her art in any sort of relation, symbolic or otherwise, to wallpaper. The decorative was anathema to artists and theoreticians who wanted art purged of ornamentation, untainted by the quotidian and by story telling. It just goes to show how quickly things can change. Women artists, in particular, have revolutionized the realm of the decorative in recent decades: reclaiming pattern as a formal device; validating handiwork such as knitting, quilting, needle pointing as legitimate means for high art expression; proclaiming that beauty is not necessarily a bad word. Narrative, too, has returned to fashion, cleverly de-constructed with torn fabrics, off-key colours and French philosophical accessories.

Out of this pluralistic and permissive cultural context comes Michèle White's ambitious new work Yellow Wallpaper. Borrowing her title from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 proto-feminist novella about a woman's descent into madness, the artist has created a psychologically charged environment in which the domestic and the disastrous are finely interlaced.

The art work Yellow Wallpaper -- a complex series of encaustic panels arranged on four walls to evoke a room -- is in no way a literal illustration of the text. Rather, the visual artist communes with the writer across a century as with a sympathetic ancestor, affirming continuity of concern and purpose. What unites the two is the courageous charting of a voyage through the maelstrom, a determination to wrest from disintegration and madness something other than shipwreck. Each bears witness to a private horror that is probably no easier to face and no better understood now than it was a hundred years ago. Each articulates a particularly female perspective within a male-dominated culture.

In Gilman's tale, the narrator has suffered a mental breakdown, possibly a post-partum depression. She has been confined to bed rest, a punitive 19th-century 'cure' based on the theory that women's minds were too fragile to handle much in the way of stimulation. Cut off from the world, the patient fixates on the only object of visual interest in her barren room: the yellow wallpaper whose very colour becomes an object of fear and disgust. All that has been repressed in her psyche surfaces as threatening imagery in the wallpaper; she struggles against increasingly malevolent forces that eventually pull her under.

Central to both the story and the art installation is the idea of the wall as a screen onto which the unconscious mind projects its fears and desires. In the 19th century work, written before the widespread acceptance of psychoanalysis and before female sexuality could be openly discussed or acknowledged, the unconscious manifests itself through symbols. Today, White demonstrates the ongoing potential of iconography to mirror the shifting world of the unconscious and its dark, fertile abundance.

Exploiting the fluid, tactile properties of encaustic, the artist builds her works layer by layer, so that time and process are part of the work. Small symbolic objects embedded in the wax appear to swim about in a primordial soup; surfaces are scratched away in a process reminiscent of the captive narrator's frantic tearing at the wallpaper in her room. A glowing, astringent shade of yellow is the common ground that unites the disparate panels. The colour rides an edge between the repellent and the alluring, as do fin-de-siècle curlicues, bar-like stripes and dappled passages suggestive of the claustrophobic domestic interiors painted a century ago by Vuillard and Bonnard.

Stifling rooms in which women sit and sit -- waiting, one might assume, to go mad. Yet Gilman's narrator must have survived or how else could she have told the tale? The same is true for her contemporary counterpart who enthrals the spectator with a journey no less absorbing and fantastic. Art becomes both a testimony to endurance and a victory -- of sorts -- over darkness.

YELLOW WALLPAPER: Recent PAINTING AT DAVID KAYE GALLERY

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THE YELLOW WALLPAPER PROJECT

Based on the novella The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, this work was begun in 2004, continues during six months in Italy in 2006, and is featured in the solo show Yellow Wallpaper, David Kaye Gallery, spring 2007. Paintings on canvas, panel, card and paper represent psychic projections onto walls, works of art, and other surfaces. Utilizing lace, net and grid-like matrices compressed and compounded in layers of encaustic wax, these works explore the female domestic interior, and the female presence/absence in the history of art and architecture.

Multiple knowledge systems are studied, expressed, and interwoven by layering and embedding signs, signifiers, and symbols into the fabric of the work. The resulting objects become visual simulacra of the projections arising out of a Freudian psychoanalysis. A major visual device operating in these paintings is reversal: background is foreground; subject is embedded in object; image is field; and "figure" comprises ground (a feature of wallpaper.)

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YELLOW WALLPAPER: GIRASOLE

These encaustic works from Italy in the spring of 2006 are responses to Tuscan sunflowers, and involve extruding pigmented wax through matrices of lace and net, and scraping back through layers to reveal flower formations, tiled and tessellated. Shown in Textile Tendencies at David Kaye Gallery, fall 2006, they are reiterations of the yellow wallpaper motif.

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SNAKES & SNAKESKIN

Comprised of hundreds of images ranging from photographic reproduction to high realism to abstraction, this series is a site to explore, mythologically and autobiographically; from where to examine exile from paradisiacal constructs; the cosmic snake/DNA, double helix, mapping and the human genome project; the shedding and re-growth of scales, of coverings and protection; fear, loss and regeneration. Examples from this body of encaustic work have been shown in Collins, Waldburger, White: Wax at the Elora Centre for the Arts, summer 2006 (with Nicole Collins and Natalie Majabar Waldburger) and in the two-person exhibition In the Garden with Linda Clementina Martinello, fall 2006.

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MOONS & PLANETS

In these encaustic works, images are projected into the abstracted and speculative surface of the dark side of the moon. Populated as well with imaginary dark planets, this body of work from 2005 explores the unconscious through material and process; pattern, repetition, and obsessive action; accident and chance.

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DIVINE COMEDY

Created between 1995 and 1998, this three-part body of work - "Archive", "Volcano" and "Garden" - was shown in several locations in Toronto in the exhibitions Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso in collaboration with the yellowhat collective. Selected pieces were shown at Angell Gallery, Toronto.

"Archive", installed on the face of a fireplace, consists of images and a stack of inaccessible books, journals and boxed objects representing a period of twenty-five years of the artist's research into the Italian poet's text. Partially obscured images of hands in the artist's daily life in Italy are suspended above Dante's Inferno text in the original terza rima, as well as in translation, on page-size supports. Ash from a contemporary "bonfire of the vanities" coats all the surfaces as pigment, loose and bound in wax or latex.

"Volcano" is an analogue of Mount Purgatory. It consists of seven double-sided encaustic coated doors spilling down a wall onto the floor. Marble dust, ash, burnt wood, and red pigment colour surfaces vary from smooth to rough to scorched and back again.

"Garden" begins with a darkened ivory-coloured antechamber. Two spot-lit marble and wax plinths each bear a cushion carrying a resolved or dissolved form. Next, a main chamber, flooded with light, contains a freestanding curved wall constructed of six double-sided hinged marble and wax doors, towards which the viewer swings on an ivory satin seat. The private garden wall of R. L. Stevenson's swing poem links childhood memory and fantasy to the death of a parent.

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EXCERPTS FROM MAKING THE GREAT REFUSAL

Created and exhibited in 1997 with Visual Arts Ontario, this body of work involves the layering of personal writing (sonnets) over reproductions of prayer rugs transferred onto sheer fabric. Hung as floating veils creating the walls of a room, these works are intensely intimate and close, addressing issues of betrayal, sexuality and death.

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ANGELIC COLLOQUY

Shown at Angell Gallery, this multi-part installation from 1996 features scraped-back, charred images of my close female friends' hands interpreting Michael Baxandall's explanation of the iconographic program used in Italian Renaissance depictions of the Annunciation. These images sit suspended several centimeters above Stephen Spender's translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's sonnet cycle Life of the Virgin Mary. They address familial loss; a typology of private and public pain.

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