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Tactile Spaces
When we first spoke, Judith Wright and I, it was to discover a shared
love of space and its potential eloquence. For both, the movement of one’s
body through space and across space is a language or way of understanding.
Perceived by most as silent and mute, the body holds coiled within its
movements a range of memories; pain, desire, fear, boredom, fascination.
To those who have been encultured within the West’s philosophical
and religious doctrines, the potential of the body to be overwhelmed by
these emotive memories is often frightening. The body is perfidious; it
leads one astray with its base instincts and diversions. One cannot trust
ones body, one must silence and tame it. But, as psychoanalysis has gone
to great pains to elucidate the body’s memory cannot be mastered
by the intellect. Something flows over, cannot be repressed.
Physical memories of the maternal, of being small and vulnerable are often
things we experience when we are ill, scared and alone. There is a sense
of moving inwards, of losing focus and objectivity. In an attempt to curb
this we often seek the horizon of the outside world, but its enormity
and busyness only reinforces the sense that we are outside, boundaryless
and lost. Small bodily processes and sensations grow louder and draw our
attention. These processes are real, present, defining.
Why is it precisely the middle space, the link between feeling boundaryless
and focussed, between an expanse and the detail that is missing as we
move through the space of Wrights Blind of Sight? The constant movement
between abstraction and detail in Wright’s paintings and videos undermines
the middle ground and the ability it provides the gaze and subsequently
the intellect to master her subject. Wright’s space is a tactile
space in which we discover, like a suckling child through the memory of
our body’s sensations, only the edges of what is happening.
I start in a dimly lit gallery, in which 12 large square paintings hang,
pinned like blankets to fall softly from the wall. The gallery is large
and the paintings, all the same size and tones, appear like portions of
a larger narrative or landscape which I only grasp in part and at what
seems like an oblique distance. Because of the dimness of the light and
the softness of the paintings forms I feel drawn to move closer until
the individual paintings are much larger than me and there is no way of
establishing edges without moving my head or body. I have the sense as
I move from one painting to the next, forwards and back, that I am moving
across an expanse and that when I reach the last painting that I will
have no better sense of the start and finish of the work, its edges, than
when I began. Indeed there is the sense that the paintings will continue
like a path in the desert, the further I walk, the more that will open
up in front of me.
"The matrix has no center, it constantly slides to the borderline,
to the margins. Its gaze escapes the margins and returns to the margins.
Through this process the limits, borderlines, and thresholds conceived
are continually transgressed or dissolved, thus allowing the creation
of new ones."
The adjoining gallery is much darker than the first. Projected on the
far wall is a large black and white image of a woman’s face appearing
and disappearing beneath hands moving white facial cream in long sensuous
strokes. The white cream is deliciously opaque and appears cool and wet
like paint straight out of a tube. The woman’s face remains still
and inert whilst the action of the hands are compelling and rhythmic.
I stand entranced sensuously soothed with a growing feeling of horror
and discomfort at the absolute stillness and vulnerability of the face.
The use of black and white and cropping out of any detail frustrates my
desire to place what is happening in front of me in any particular time
and space. The image hangs at once persistent and fleeting.
"What finally frightens you and throws you into disorder is the knowledge
that desire sometimes makes you a victim, you become flesh, without identity
and without meaning"
To one side, near the door is a much smaller projection. Warm in tone
and very soft in focus this projection feels more familiar and intimate
in its scale and its presence. Soft washes of flesh tone merge into darker
shadows, as gentle curves and forms appear only to blur before I can grasp
the meaning of their shape. The more I concentrate the more the sense
that I know this image slides away. Then almost with a shock the forms
sharpen and my senses flood with the recognition of a baby pushing its
head into flesh, mouth open searching for its mothers nipple. I am no
longer standing looking but awash in my bodies memory.
"Concerning that stage of my childhood, scented, warm, and soft to
the touch, I have only a spatial memory. Not time at all. Fragrance of
honey, roundness of forms, silk and velvet under my fingers, on my cheeks.
Mummy. Almost no sight - a shadow that darkens, soaks me up, or vanishes
amid flashes"
It may seem incomprehensible, at first that the paintings in Blind of
Sight are edits from a short video of a mother breast feeding her child
or that a woman having a facial could have any connection with this most
symbolic of acts. However what emerges the longer one is with the work
is a realisation that Wright is not interested in representing breastfeeding
per se; rather that this powerful event acts as a trigger for other layers
of experience which have often been repressed visual representation. Indeed,
the iconic image of a mother suckling her child is found at the very heart
of Western representation as both a symbol of the ideal transcendence
of the body and the repression of an archaic all encompassing pleasure
(for both mother and child).
The function of the maternal, as symbolized in the figure of the Virgin
Mary with child acts within the history of painting as a mark of the sacred
and unnameable. But it does not succeed in doing this "without relying
on the feminine representation of an immortal biology" . That is
this representation gains its power through the memory of another unnameable
experience - childhood before language in which there is no link between
different sensual experiences and the maternal body is a source of pleasure,
bounty, safety and trauma. That and the repression of the female body,
it’s many sourced pleasure and way of knowing the world. In the image
of the Holy Virgin and Child we are provided with a way of visually consuming
and mastering what is otherwise unnameable and ungraspable.
What Wright seeks in her mobilisation of space, shifts between mediums
and abstraction is to introduce a system of different viewing distances
and conditions, which provide vastly different experiences. Here "especially
haptic qualities are demanded of the viewer; not to follow optically the
line of ideas and see only the representation proper, the surface, but
to probe with eyes the pictorial texture and even to enter the texture
and probe below the texture" . Such "touching" with the
eye does not provide the grounded sense of having touched something with
ones hands. Unable to project ourselves we feel disorientated and without
a position in which to secure the act of looking. We are thrown back on
our bodies - the vulnerable and unruly body resembling early childhood.
In Blind of Sight, the space of our bodies is a space of vulnerability
and a certain degree of anxiety. There is however a rhythm to this work
that reminds me of Oliver Sachs description of his experiences of a phantom
limb, in which he moves from the feeling of being unable to connect to
his leg, absolutely at the mercy of his body to discovering a rhythm within
his body in which to move. Wright’s Blind of Sight provides a space
in which, not able to trust our sight we are encouraged to stop and listen
for the presence of a different mode or rhythm for being in the world.
"It seems that there has long been a connection in our culture, or
a least in our psyches, between the loss of sight and the loss of self"...And
yet it might be that the connection is in fact the other way round: that
a dimming of sight, a changed condition of seeing, and therefore a change
in our social relations, forces us not into a loss of self but into a
confrontation with the self."
by Ruth McDougall
Tactile Spaces, first published in exhibition
catalogue Blind of Sight, Institute of Modern
Art, Brisbane, 2002.
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