White shadow

Exhibition entitled 'Unframed' accompanying publication, Standpoint Gallery, London 15 Apr - 10 May 2004. Opening and book launch event, 15 Apr 2004. Exhibitors included 13 participants including internationally acclaimed artists: Sam Taylor Wood, Susan Hiller, Jane Harris. One work exhibited: 'White Shadow'. Additional event: Conference 'Unframed' 7 May 2004. University of the Arts, Camberwell College of Art, London. Paper given. This painting was part of a series of works produced for an AHRB Small Award research project entitled Between Surface and Screen; Painting and the Digital Image in an experimental dialogue. The research questions were: 1. What are the possibilities for dialogue between digital technology and painting practice, within the context of historical debates around photography and painting and the development of differing conceptions of the picture plane in painting? 2. What are the implications of a hybrid mode of practice, combining the materiality of painting and the mechanical processing of the digital, for an investigation of the ways in which experiences of memory and perception might be inscribed in images? To pursue these questions, I set up a mechanism for conversation between the surface of a painting and the digital screen, through which one working process was passed to the other, reworked and passed back, so that rather than remain as a one-way transfer the work continued to circulate between modes of operation, the process defining itself as the in-between of differing practices and positions. The work explored a layered surface density, setting up a particular form of picture plane; a fluctuating figure/ground and referencing Proust’s notion of a Mottled Screen to research an unfolding of simultaneous different states, and the notion of ground as a screen. The piece was exhibited in the context of the publication of a new book exploring contemporary women artists’ practice. I also presented the research through seminar and conference papers in which haptic visuality as a thematic was discussed in the context of notions of identity and difference. The essay in the book, Threads by Rosa Lee, for which I was interviewed, also focused on the haptic and memory