Preface

A version of this long essay on the artist Ken Kiff was originally written for the catalogue of what was intended to be a major exhibition of his work in the RWA’s galleries in Bristol. Sadly, what would have been a very substantial exhibition of a major figure in recent British painting failed to materialise. I did not attempt to publish that essay, both because of its length and because I had hoped that, at some point, a similar exhibition opportunity to which I could hope to contribute might appear. That now seems unlikely. So, rather than leave many months of work “on file”, I have decided that I will put a version of that original essay online here in instalments. When putting the first section of this essay on line I wrote:

‘There is, of course, a major disadvantage in having to “publish” it in this way: namely that, unlike when reading a catalogue, you cannot turn to the images about which I write. Some of these can be found online, others are included in catalogues and books devoted to the artist.  I hope you will take the trouble to hunt out at least some of these’.

Subsequently, through the good offices of John Talbot who had read the first two essay sections and is in touch with the Estate of Ken Kiff Ltd., I have been given copyright permission to reproduce images of the work of Ken Kiff. I am very grateful both to John and the Estate for this, since it clearly makes an enormous difference to be able to include Kiff’s images here.     

N.B. All images reproduced in this and subsequent sections are copyright and reproduced here courtesy of The Estate of Ken Kiff and Hales London and New York. ©The Estate of Ken Kiff. All rights reserved, DACS 2024. No image should be reproduced in any form without the permission of the Estate of Ken Kiff Ltd.  

Introduction.

Ken Kiff Old man being sick, comforted by a large man rising out of the ground (Sequence 27)

Ken Kiff’s small painting Old man being sick, comforted by a large man rising out of the ground (S27), dates from 1971, the year he began The Sequence, arguably his major work. The painting’s various elements – the men of the title, the large expanse of green, the woman in the purple dress, the trunk of a tree, the narrow strip of blue sky with a single grey cloud – are loosely painted but very carefully placed within the off-square support. Glimpses of white paper, along with traces of paint on the brown margin of tape that originally held the support to a board, reinforce the sense that this image evokes rather than represents. Despite the scene’s strangeness, the way the larger man cradles the older one is as matter-of-fact as the tree trunk in the middle distance. Yet the presence of the larger man rising out of the ground is ambiguous, thinly-enough painted for us to glimpse the green behind him through his head. Is this an uncanny event glimpsed in peripheral vision, a dream, or is it simply an evocation of compassion? Who’s to say, yet it has the strange and compelling matter-of-factness of a folktale or a Catholic retablo painting.

This essay sets out to explore the resonances of such images, the visual poetics that animate them, and to indicate the wider context in which I would suggest they now appear.   

Although deeply engaged in making paintings, drawings and prints, Kiff was endlessly curious about all the arts; as interested in Wallace Stevens or Mozart as Braque, Nancy Spiro or Sigmar Polke. His curiosity extended to the world at large, an important factor in a quiet radicalism entirely without the self-conscious rebelliousness that Guy Debord links to an acceptance of the status quo for the simple reason that dissatisfaction itself has become a commodity. To explore this, I will start from Garner Tullis’ notion that Kiff was a poet without a tongue, someone who by-passed Western modernity’s categorical distinctions between the different arts, between its high culture and other post-colonial, “subaltern” cultures, between consciousness and the subconscious, and between reality and imagination. A visual poet who combined a concern with the radical possibilities inherent in the “language” of early modern painting, and with “the Feminine” understood in a broadly Jungian sense (as linking the conscious and unconscious realms and so able to disrupt the deceptively tranquil surface of everyday social, familial and domestic lives). Also, perhaps most fundamentally, with the richness inherent in our proximity to what, in Irish, is termed an saol eile (“the other life”), a phrase reductively paraphrased in English as “the unconscious”. All of which led him to visualise how complex internal worlds and multi-faceted selves are manifest in the everyday world.

Kiff‘s images employ highly evocative colour to figure the mutuality of the mundane and “other” world in ways that are constantly surprising. As such, they also serve as a tacit critique of the extent to which Modernist and post-Modernist art largely fails to connect with or inform any common life. Kiff’s approach to the body is fundamental here. The poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill observes that, in the Irish language, orifices and excrements are understood without prudishness or purulence as “an nádúir”, or “nature”, a source of humour rather than of shame or embarrassment. Questioned about imagery that included such things, it became very clear that Kiff felt the same.

Ken Kiff Excrement-1 (Sequence 57)

Kiff’s work has, in my view, been under-appreciated, particularly since his death in 2001. There are a number of possible reasons for this. His work is not easy to categorise. It builds on a view of the ongoing value of the “formal” lessons for the language of painting of the early twentieth century. A view at odds with mainstream art historical notions of “progress” and perhaps closer in orientation to the work of some of Kiff’s near-contemporaries working in India, rather than to artists in the West. Furthermore, Kiff shared Gaston Bachelard’s view that  the image cannot give matter to the concept and that the concept, by giving stability to the image, would stifle its existence. A view very much at odds with the analytic and conceptual preoccupations of academic art discourse and art oriented to them.

In what follows I will begin by taking up the issue of categorisation, provide some brief biographical information, and then outline the basis of what I see as Kiff’s quiet radicalism in relation to his concern with “wholeness”. I will discuss his “psychic realism” and indicate the adverse conditions under which he managed to develop it. I will then turn to particular clusters of images: The Sequence, those made to accompany folktales, the Goddess images, and Acceptance and related works. In the final section I consider the wider context in which his work now appears.

‘Ken [Kiff] is a poet without a tongue as a true painter should always be’.

                        Garner Tullis

One – I grew up in the second half of the 20^th century, a cultural era often referred to in the visual arts as “late Modernism”, when leading art critics promoted the notion of the separateness and exclusivity of each of the arts in their “advanced” forms. I was fortunate to work with the painter Ken Kiff on a book about his Sequence and came to understand why he rejected the dominant cultural of late Modernism for in favour a more inclusive approach to making images. As perhaps implicit in Garner Tullis’ observation above, Kiff read poetry avidly – by Rilke, Yeats, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost and Vladimir Mayakovsky. He was particularly interested in both the poetry and art writing of Yves Bonnefoy, which  helped to shape his whole orientation as a painter. He also developed a close working friendship with the contemporary poet Martha Kapos – an art historian and a colleague teaching with Kiff at Chelsea School of Art – who would come to write perceptively about his work, particularly his use of colour.

Thinking about Ken today, it seems to me more important than ever to celebrate a highly original visual artist who related so deeply to the work of poets. 

Ken Kiff comes to mind because he was someone who was true to his own particular vision of the world and made his way without conforming to the expectations of the cultural status quo in the visual arts. His quiet defiance in this respect so unsettled John Hoyland, an abstract painter heavily identified with the ideology of late Modernist painting, that he publicly dismissed Kiff’s work out of hand, claiming that he had turned his back on ‘all the understanding of what’s gone on in modern art’. In fact nothing could have been further from the truth. Kiff simply had a much broader and deeper understanding of modern art than Hoyland; an understanding that critically engaged not simply with the various strands within early modern painting, but also with poetry and music.  Hoyland’s conformity to the the “progressive” ideology that sustained a certain view of abstract painting can be seen as part-and-parcel of late Modernism’s professionalised alienation from any connection with, or attempt to inform, our common life. Perry Anderson has indicated the cause of that alienation in Modernist culture: its complicity with a market preoccupied with ‘commodities, including works of art’. For Anderson, the revolutionary possibilities that informed the Cubism and Surrealism on which Kiff pondered long and hard – on the work of Picasso, Chagall and Miro, for example – came to an end with Abstract Expressionism, after which painting in the West was increasingly driven by a commercial gallery system that needed a ‘regular output of new styles’ to feed a market increasingly aligned to the cultural values of ‘haute-couture’. So to Hoyland, wholly identified with the late Modernist notion of “progressive” abstraction, Kiff’s richly varied forms of figurative work could only appear isolated and regressive. They appear very differently, however, if we choose to see them as an articulation of an expanded and inclusive visual poetics, one engaged with what the poet John Burnside refers to as ‘the dailiness of everyday life’.

Two – Sometimes very different moments in our experience align in unexpected ways. I have always puzzled over the literalism that insists that different types of cultural activity are understood as isolated one from another. An example would be the concern expressed by some writers over failure to differentiate between “literature” and “song-writing”; a “failure” that provoked farce reaction in some quarters when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.

My puzzlement surfaced again recently when, after listening to Paul Simon’s song America, I happened to re-read Paula Meehan’s The Moon Rose Over an Open Field. Her title is, of course, the last line from the third verse of Simon’s song. I take Meehan’s poem to be both a celebration of Simon’s skill with language as a song-writer and an expression of gratitude for the positive effect the song had on her when she was a young woman. (You can find the poem on page 251 of her As If By Magic: selected poems, published by Wake Forest University Press in 2021). Having read John Burnside’s I Put a Spell on You (2014), I suspect that he too would not want to draw too firm a distinction between the two forms, although that’s not something I can be certain of.

Unlike those poets who want to insist on an absolute distinction between what a poet and a song-writer make, Paula Meehan has happily acknowledged a blurring of the lines between these two activities. She has said that she began her engagement with the power of language by listening to, and then writing song lyrics under the influence of, artists like Joni Mitchell, Sandy Denny and Van Morrison. So it’s indicative that she sub-titles her poem The Ghost of My Mother Comforts Me, ‘after Van Morrison’ (you can find it on page 80 of As If By Magic). The poem contains echoes that reference the phrase ‘gardens wet with rain’ that appears in both Morrison’s Sweet Thing from his 1968 Astral Weeks and in In the Garden, a song from No Guru, No Method, No Teacher that was released in 1986. It’s this second song that, I would guess, Meehan had in mind when she acknowledged her dept to Morrison.  

All this matters to me because it seems important to acknowledge that what touches us culturally, what wakes us to being present to the complexities of our relationship to the world, comes in many forms. Forms, types or modes of articulation that, if bound up too tightly with the expectations invested in fixed categories and the hierarchies of value attached to them so as to distinguish, say, “high” from “popular” culture, can blind us to what is valuable in our own responses. This is not to suggest that some works of art are more significant within a culture than others – it’s not unreasonable to claim that the work of J S Bach is more significant than that of Chip Taylor – but I also need to remember that Taylor’s Wild Thing may have had a real significance in someone’s life, someone for whom the music of Bach is a closed book. I think it also matters because the forms of articulation we call the arts can take on new energy and meaning when they cross-pollinate or when one art form offers an artist working in another strengthens her or his desire to resist the dominant theoretical framings that inhibit what they feel they need to do creatively.

Postscript

As so often happens, no sooner had I posted this than I came across a piece of writing that I should have known about and referenced. In this case, the chapter Like a Striped Pair of Pants in John Burnside’s excellent book The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century (Profile Books, 2019). In it he offers a very clear and helpful discussion of the distinction between poetry and song, while at the same time addressing the various reasons why we need such a clear understanding of the real basis for that distinction, one that has nothing to do with ‘maintaining a cultural hierarchy commensurate with a class based social order’. His argument is made all the more compelling by his deep knowledge, and clear enjoyment, of the best in both categories together with his awareness of how they feed each other.

It makes no sense to try to think through the notion of deep mapping as conversation unless I’m first clear about what the word conversation refers to in this context. Perhaps the best place to start here is with a claim made by the curator Monica Szewczyk  in an article called ‘Art of Conversation, Part 1’ in e-flux journal no 3 – February 2009. There she writes: “… if, as an art, conversation is the creation of worlds, we could say that to choose to have a conversation with someone is to admit them into the field where worlds are constructed. And this ultimately runs the risk of redefining not only the ‘other’ but us as well” (italics mine). While I believe this may indeed be the case, it clearly does not refer to the type of verbal exchange referred to as “conversation” that most of us have most of the time.

Arguably the most important quality that marks out a genuine conversation has nothing to do with what it’s about, what the participants say, but is rather to do with the quality of how they listen to each other. Someone once observed that, if you listen carefully to two academics having a discussion, you’ll soon come to realise that when one is silent it’s not because he’s actually listening to what the other is saying but, instead, is mentally preparing what he’s going to say next. This is even more obvious in political exchanges and interviews on TV.

To really listen to another person requires something close to an act of unconditional care towards that person, one in which the listener tries as far as possible to let go of her or his own concerns; the desire to win an argument, to impress, to ingratiate themselves, to flatter, to demonstrate superior knowledge, wit, or “woke-ness”. In short, to set aside the assumption of exchange as something based on having an agenda, whether explicit or tacit. To attempt a genuine conversation, an exchange not already predetermined by the mental parameters within which you are willing to attend to what another person says, is indeed an art, one that requires a great deal of practice to develop. To really listen to another person requires both the willingness and the ability to set aside one’s own positions and pre-judgements. To attempt to hear what they say on their own terms and without the habitual series of reactive judgements that usually accompany my listening. All of which matters because, unless I’m willing at least to attempt this, I have no chance of touching on what my friend Siân refers to as our “core commonality”. Of course all this is an ideal, one that most of us will fail to reach, but we can remember Samuel Becket’s advice and keep making the attempt, failing again no doubt, but hopefully failing better.

It’s attempting genuine listening that opens into what Szewczyk calls conversation as an art, as the creation of worlds. It’s also this attempt that links us to what I referred to earlier as the unending conversation or exchange that grounds us through attending to the world in its fullest sense. And, because conversation is by definition a two-way process, it must ultimately involve us in attending – both in the sense of attentively listening, as when a teacher asks her class to “pay attention” to her or to each other, and in the sense of an act of caring for or attending to, an act predicated on that open listening. 

Arguably, then, it’s because people, particularly those with power and authority, refuse to attempt the art of conversation, that so much of the world’s suffering happens. It happens, in short, because they (we?) don’t want to run the risk of being in a situation that might redefine not only the responses of others but, in the process, our sense of ourself.     

At present, it might seem that the obvious examples of the lack of genuine listening and conversation relate to extreme examples, for example the wars we see reported daily in the media. But in the UK there is real everyday suffering caused by the simple refusal of those with power and authority to genuinely listen to others. To go into this in any real depth would take me a long way from my main concern here. However, I can point to an example, one that’s very much part of my own experience. It’s a situation that’s the consequence of professional people not listening, of failing to attempt to engage in genuine conversations in order to protect their sense of professional authority, something that perfectly illustrates the point I want to make. You can find this example online at a site set up by my wife called Dialogues – ME/CFS.

What has all this to do with deep mapping?

Put very simply, deep mapping can be seen as an attempt to enter into a genuine conversation, only not with another person but rather with a place. As suggested earlier, that involves a two-way process between person and place. It involves listening to, attending to, manifestations of the multiple, indeed probably endless, particular qualities of a place, seen as the taskscape over time of human and other-than-human life.  It also involves attending, not only to the multiplicities of place as they immediately appear or are currently represented, its literal presence as the sum of a plurality of relationships, but also to all those aspects of the specific place that have not been “heard”, that is to say recognised or acknowledged. And, if one really listens to a place, it will speak back to . If we attend to those aspects of a place that have been consciously or unconsciously overlooked, neglected or repressed, it repays our attention by subtly changing, reconfiguring itself. Again, all this requires practice and patience, a particular act of care.

We can begin, however, by attending to some particular aspect of a place. Attending, that is, not to the given categories that are used to define a place, but to what strikes our own curiosity in terms of how some particular aspect of it starts to solicit attention, which is how it speaks. That aspect can, in turn, offer a starting-point for sketching out the working limits of what a deep mapping might attempt.   

If, for example, I was to consider begining a deep mapping of Farlands, I might start by reflecting on the implications of a simple change of name in relation to what appears, physically, when I walk around the place. The building currently named as Broadmeadows, which lies just south of the mire that feeds into the beck that runs approximately north north east through Farlands, was previously called Bogmire. What this suggests to me is either thatthere has been an actual drying out of the area, perhaps through a process of draining, that enabled an area of bog to be transformed into meadow, or else it simply reflects a change of ownership and with it a change to a more picturesque name. A change that might also reflect a shift of attitude towards bogs as “unproductive” wetland. Either way, listening to, attending to, that change of name and its implications, is enough to begin the process of listening to the place as a whole through how it solicits my attention.    

It may be that, as an aspect of the transformation of Farlands, some form of deep mapping activity also takes place. Whether or not that happens is entirely up to Will and Charlotte but, if that is indee what happens, I hope to be part of the conversation.   

Recently, I’ve read texts by two women who have used forms of deep mapping in order to engage more fully with particular places to which they’ve been drawn. The more extensive of the two texts, “Dying Water: An investigation into the uncommoning, attention, and poetic first-aid in the watery landscape of the River Leven” is by Genevieve Sawyer Males. It’s her dissertation for a Masters by Research in Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, part of the University of Dundee, where she’s been working there with Professor Mary Modeen, with whom I co-authored Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place: Geopoetics, Deep Mapping and Slow Residency. The second text is a second draft of a chapter for a doctoral project, provisionally called “Every Contact Leaves a Trace: An investigation into the potential of ceramic and print process to extend understanding of the temporal, material and transient in landscape”. It’s by Sally Wetheral, a doctoral student at Bath Spa University, and part of a deep mapping of the landscape that enfolds the village in which she and her family live.

There’s a great deal that could be said about both the social and environmental values embodied by these projects and about the particular ways in which each employs a specific and distinctive form of deep mapping. However interesting and valuable as these are, they are not my concern here. Although it is related to the values these two texts embody, my focus here has been prompted by one aspect of an exchange I’ve been have with Siân Barlow about the reductive mentality created by over-reliance on the pervasive “short-hand” of taken-for-granted categories.

Siân and I know each other through the Utopias Bach collaborative and a shared interest in poetry. She lives in Wales, writes poems and makes visual art but, as she writes in a recent email, it is always: “dangerous to put people into categories of identity, for almost any reason I can think of”. (In a previous email I had used a series of categories: of gender, nationality, language, vocation and age to characterise my sense of myself in relation to a particular event). She adds that, in “bundling up identities” using those categories in the way that I had, I risk “obscuring within that a spectrum of differences, and maybe worse, obscuring a core commonality”.

The implications of the first danger are indicated by Geraldine Finn’s observation that “we are always both more and less than the categories that name and divide us”. (An observation I built on to articulated the situation of those whose creativity is not easily identified simple as that of “an artist” in the book chapter ‘Ensemble Practices’, published in the Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm). I am, in short, both more and less than is implied by naming my gender, nationality, language, vocation and age.

However, it’s the second danger that strikes me as particularly relevant to what we attempt when we get involved in deep mapping. While we may set out to indicate and evoke, in part through articulating the particularities and differences that go into making up our experience of place, what is nevertheless an underlying sense of what Siân refers to as “a core commonality”, too exclusive a focus on those particularities and differences may obscure a deeper commonality.

A commonality I see as the result of a shared sense of being enmeshed in and with a myriad of psycho-socio-environmental relationships. A dynamic that I understand as being grounded in and inseparable from what might be called an underlying “conversational weave”. (In Anglo-Saxon poetry “word-weaver” was a common metaphor for a narrator, and as such the image of waeving seems to me highly relevant to Paul Ricoeur’s notion of “narrative identity”). Conversation, then, is not simply an open exchange of the lements out of which narrative identities are “woven” between people, although that is obviously deeply important element of it. It’s also, and perhaps more profoundly, the unending flow of exchange that grounds us through our attending to the world. Attending here both in the sense of listening, as when a teacher says “please pay attention” to her class, but also in the sense of caring, as when a doctor asks a nurse to “attend to” a patient’s medical needs. 

As it happens, I have recently been fortunate enough to experience something of how the unfolding of an example of this broader understanding of conversation takes place in practice. A conversation that, in this case, was focused by collective attending to an area of land with the ultimate aim of restore it to something closer to its condition prior to enclosure, to the quarrying still evident near the road that runs through the lower, norther, end of the plot, and the post-quarrying planting of a plantation of sitka spruce.   

Clearing Sitka Spruce

I initially became caught up in this conversation back in May of this year when Charlotte, a former student on the art degree I was responsible for at UWE, Bristol, contacted me about her growing interest in deep mapping. Both in relation to the particular plot of land she and Will are concerned with and also with regard to its potential for inter- and trans- disciplinary approaches within school education. That initial contact led to an online meeting and to my discovering that she and her partner Will were working to convert their plot of land via what might best be described, not as “re-wilding” so much as a return to an earlier, less monocultural, state. A mixed state of affairs environmentally-speaking that, as far as Will and I can tell would, prior to enclosure, have constituted what Will describes as the “commons and wastes of the Manor”, and area without “field boundaries”, and “a mix of rough grazing, water courses” – the beck and a now-covered field drain run down from an old and still existent area of mire or bog – along with “lots of scrub, teeming with wild life”.

South end of the plot situated on the edge of a mire.

The plot, known as Farlands, is situated less than an hour’s drive from where my wife, our daughter and I spend our summers in Co. Durham so, following an invitation to visit both Charlotte’s studio and Farlands, I went over and spent the best part of a day with Charlotte, Will and three of their friends. One of whom works for the Woodland Trust and has been advising on how best not only to remove and replace the Sitka Spruce in Farlands’ wooded area, but also to extend its area of woodland into what is now a field. This, together with the “daylighting” and sequential partial damming of the field drain, should transform the plot back into a type of wooded mire that can still be found in isolated areas in the English / Scottish border region.

Wooded wetland

In 1998 Agnes Martin, working with fine graphite lines and acrylic on a gesso ground,  made the painting that she would call Untitled no. 5. It’s hard to describe her paintings at the best of times. This one is, of course, square and made up of seven horizontal bands of colour – three are pale blue (top, middle and bottom) and two each a very pale yellow and a pale, slightly orange pink. So the sequence, from top to bottom, is blue, pink, yellow, blue, pink, yellow, blue. The overall sense of the painting seems to be of a quiet pulsing of pale-coloured light. I find it interesting to think about this highly “abstract” painting in relation to Eileen Lawrence’s Seven Voids (1991-92), which is made up of the seven separate horizontal bands (each 7.5 x 53 cms) painted in watercolour on paper with traces of gold leaf, principally in a block on the second band down from the top. While at first each band appears to be a red modulated by some degree of gestural marking, on closer inspection it becomes apparent that these marks are in fact more or less referential – to hair, to a leaf, to what might be a bone, and so on. The painting comes across as almost a distillation of what Lawrence undertook in two large oil paintings from the same period: Isis (1991) and Forms of Flight (1991-92), with which it shares certain iconographic elements. None of the three paintings is a literal representation. Rather they seem to me to evoke intuitions of certain senses of possibility. If Martin’s painting appears to be a statement of a unified, or perhaps more accurately barely qualified and transcendent sense of ‘happiness, joy and beauty’, as has been suggested, how are we to respond to Lawrence’s work?

I believe there is an important distinction that can be made between the vision of wholeness Agnes Martin seeks to articulate in Untitled no. 5 (1998), where articulation is reduced to subtle variations and repetitions of colour, and the highly particular and subtle alternative offered by Lawrence’s Seven Voids. Lawrence, like Pat Steir, is not prepared to strip her art down to what, in terms of mystical thinking, might be described as articulations of a sense of being only just on the human (differentiating) side of identifying with a luminous void. Unlike Steir, however, the faint “representational” references in Lawrence’s work to natural objects are less inflected by either Conceptualist concerns with the “language” of painting or with a play of Art Historical reference. While I see Steir as ultimately making art that, for all its use of references to such elements in the natural world as waterfalls, remains primarily concerned with intellectual questions about the nature of beauty and representation, I see both Martin and Lawrence, in their different ways, as ultimately concerned with what, very broadly speaking, can be called intuitions of ethical or spiritual concern. Exploring the difference between them is where, for me, John Burnside’s writing is so helpful.

For Martin as a painter, and as she famously said: “happiness is the goal, isn’t it”, so that she could describe her work as giving people the same feeling as “when you wake up in the morning”. But to frame my own response to Untitled no. 5 (1998) in that way would require me to acknowledge that, while there may have been brief moments on waking in the morning, at certain times in my life and in certain conditions, when that’s brought an unalloyed sense of happiness – a happiness very similar to that given at the end of a meditation session when my thoughts have dropped away and I am wholly in a state in which mind, body and feeling appear undifferentiated – this is a rare and highly exceptional state of being. One that depends on either a chance moment when, awakening, I find myself floating free from the flow of what John Burnside calls ‘the commonplaces of “the dailiness of life”, or else that I can try to reach through some form of deliberate psycho-spiritual practice. In either case what I am experiencing might be described as a brief detachment from the flow of time in which only an unqualified and somehow expanded present moment appears “real”. While I have no quarrel whatsoever with those who wish to pursue this moment as central to their life, as I believe Martin almost certainly did, my own circumstances lead me to be concerned with an alternative orientation grounded in the “thought of the heart”.

Eileen Lawrence’s Seven Voids, as I hope my description above makes clear, are not in fact voids at all, but neither do they simply provide “representations” of objects in the usual sense. Perhaps the simplest way to describe this work is to compare it to what differentiates a meditation session from my everyday state of attention. In that everyday state attention is constantly shifted in its focus – for longer or shorter lengths of time and both consciously and unconsciously – by thoughts, bodily sensations, or feelings. For example in working on this essay, while my conscious attention is primarily on the train of thought I am trying to follow, my attention as a whole fluctuates and flickers as it is taken by the draft from the window, the tension in my back that requires me to adjust my posture, or else is entirely broken when the postwoman knocks on the door.

In a good meditation session the draft, my back tension, even the postwoman’s knock, will all present themselves to my consciousness. However, while they are acknowledged for what they are and allowed to flow through, my attention remains focused on listening for, or attending to, the sense of undifferentiated wholeness, (which might also be called “emptiness” or a void) that lies beneath or behind that inevitable flow of thoughts, bodily sensations, and feelings. Agnes Martin’s Untitled no. 5, seeks to evoke a state where that flow is discounted or denied, or so it seems to me. In doing so it adopts an ideal position that I can respect but not identify with or aspire to. Eileen Lawrence’s Seven Voids appears, by contrast, to acknowledge the continuous shadowy flow of Burnside’s ‘commonplaces of “the dailiness of life”’, while simultaneously acknowledging a desire to listen for, try to be present to, what lies beneath or behind, what is co-present with, that flow.

Why does any of this matter? I suggest that a (very tentative) answer to that question might be that Lawrence’s approach is somehow closely bound up with Burnside’s balancing of commitment to the ecological need to practice, on a daily basis, ‘une vie commune’ – that is ‘a lived, deliberate conviviality in which all life is felt to be’ both ‘continuous’ and, in its flow, somehow present – with an acknowledgement that ‘each of us who is, or has been here on earth, is destined for inexistence’. That is, to acknowledge both the flow of life and the fact that our individual death is necessary to the continuity of that flow. To properly elaborate on this balancing act would require me to undertake a free and detailed paraphrase of Burnside’s highly personal yet deeply applicable essay ‘Blossom: Ruins’ in Aurochs and Auks: Essays on Mortality and Extinction, something I simply don’t feel competent to do. I would, however, recommend that book, and particularly its final chapter, to anyone who has followed me to this point.   

I find it odd, to say the least, that the last major exhibition of Eileen Lawrence’s work in the UK was back in 1992. It consisted of work she’d made between 1977 and 1992 and was shown at the Usher Gallery, Lincoln – where it was linked to her contribution to The Journey, a major visual arts project in Lincoln that raised questions about the relationship between contemporary art and religious and/or spiritual concerns – and then at the Fruit Market Gallery in Edinburgh. I found that exhibition so compelling that I made the long cross-country journey from the North Pennines to Lincoln twice to see both it and the installation of her Lincoln Prayer Sticks in the Cathedral. Some years later I visitedher studio in Edinburgh to see more of her work and to discuss the possibility of putting together a monograph on it, a project that sadly came to nothing. However, as a result I know there is a whole range of Lawrence’s work that would not only provide excellent material for an major exhibition but that, more importantly, would raise important questions in relation to attitudes to our sense of self, our mortality, the places in which we live, and so the whole question of our relationship to the natural world.  In short, the attitudes that concern me here.

In trying to think about those questions, I have drawn heavily on the work of the poet John Burnside who died shortly before I started work on this essay. I’ve been reading his Aurochs and Auks: Essays On Mortality And Extinction, I Put A Spell On You and The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century, but also the poems that make up Ruin, Blossom (2024), along with Afterlife and the notes he wrote in relation to it. Burnside’s writing is particularly helpful to me here because, as one of his editors notes, like a number of other Scottish writers of his generation he was quite willing to tackle: ‘the big spiritual questions’. (A phrase I’m not sure Burnside himself would have been entirely happy with, unless the term “spiritual” was suitably qualified as referring to a quality that’s not opposed to, or even distinct from, the mundane, the earthly, the everyday). In short, I find Burnside’s point relates to my sense of Eileen Lawrence’s work.     

Thinking about parallels between Burnside’s comments on the literary world and Rebecca Solnit’s reflections on beauty, in her As Eve Said To The Serpent, suggests one possible answer to the question of why Lawrence’s work has is not better known. I suspect this has to do with the unashamed beauty of so much of Lawrence’s work; a beauty exemplified by the extraordinary Nightsong from Images of Paradise (1989). This painting measures 170 by 255 cms (5’ 7” x 8’ 4”) and is constituted by luminous, flickering blues and greens, often set down with minute strokes, along with a wound-shaped slit described in gold leaf that runs the whole height of the work just in from its left-hand side. Part of what makes it so astonishingly luminous is that it’s painted in watercolour on paper. Apart from the two barely visible feathers on the left-hand side, it’s difficult to “name” the elements that make up this quietly unsettling work, somehow simultaneously somehow nocturnal and aquatic. Or so I wrote when I first drafted this. Then I read the passage in Burnside’s I Put A Spell On You where he summaries what the Chinese master Chu Hsi says about the working of the Tao in everything, what he calls li. Li seems to me to come closest to “naming” the real topic of Nightsong, Burnside’s passage is worth quoting in full:

…li refers to the innumerable vein-like patterns included in the Tao … Li is like a piece of thread with its strands, or like this basket. One strip goes this way, and the other goes that way. It is also like the grain in bamboo … (p. 40).  

I also think an observation by Burnside about the “poetry Scene”, one that applies equally to the “art Scene”, is directly relevant to a work like this. In a short interview with Jesse Nathan, Burnside questions what he sees as the over-emphasis of ‘content’ by individuals anxious to prove their ‘socio-political credentials’, where ‘content’ is explicit and set apart from the creation and deployment of vivid metaphor. Here he evokes Hannah Arendt’s observation that: ‘Thinking creates its “concepts’ out of the visible, in order to designate the invisible’. I understand this as linked to Solnit’s argument that intellectual engagement with the arts by, broadly speaking, those committed to an unqualified and literal rationalism is haunted by a fear of beauty. Not only because it cannot be made to straightforwardly enhance what Burnside calls ‘socio-political credentials’ but, equally, because it bypasses reasoned intellectual argumentation by appealing directly to the senses. As such, it also sidesteps the authority of those whose status depends on their “mastery” of such argumentation. Beauty is, in short, the wild card that short-circuits the mechanisms on which the power of critical and academic authority depends. Add to this that beauty deployed in conjunction with a metaphorical title, as in Nightsong from Images of Paradise,speaks of ‘invisible’ qualities not subject to rational or theoretical explanation. In this context the reason why an institution like Tate Britain underrepresents Lawrence’s work becomes easier to understand.

In contrast to the conceptual and theory-heavy preoccupations of the London-based “art Scene”, a number of Scottish artists of Lawrence’s generation adopted what the art historian Duncan Macmillan refers to as ‘a careful attention to spacing and symmetry which is … ultimately Japanese in origin’. A strategy specifically designed to enhance ‘the sense of the metaphysical presence in the objects that are described’ (Scottish Art in the 20^th Century 1994, p. 135). I see this as having a partial parallel with Agnes Martin’s concern to focus attention on nothing other than spacing and symmetry. Macmillan also notes, writing of Lawrence’s partner Glen Onwin, that both artists engage in ‘an analysis of the physical detail of nature that, by its very closeness, while it emulated the scientific approach, could also capture something of our sense of the presence of the transcendental in the mundane’ [italics mine].(ibid. p. 137). In the context of the three painters referenced here, it is this ‘capture’ that distinguishes Lawrence’s work from that of Pat Steir, which, for all its renditions of flowers or birds,  lacks a detailed analysis of the physical detail of nature that could capture ‘something of our sense of the presence of the transcendental in themundane’ precisely because her primary concern is with problematising issues of representation within a conceptual framework.  

It’s in the context of what may be seen as a variation on what Macmillan suggests is a tension between the scientific and the transcendental, perhaps, that Fiona McLeod begins her catalogue essay on Lawrence for New North by quoting the American professor and writer on art, Donald Kuspit  as follows:

‘A truly vital Modern art would not only collect details of the experience of aliveness but would integrate them into a new kind of living whole: not a kind of god, or a surrogate for one, as much traditional art implicitly was, but an analogue of the Truth Self’. (“The Only Immortal” article in Artforum, from February 1990, which can be accessed online).

Kuspit derives his notion of the True Self from psychoanalysis, in particular from Freud and D. W. Winnicott. Fiona McLeod, following his argument, uses it to position Lawrence’s work psychoanalytically, namely in terms of “the struggle between life and death instincts”. However, while McLeod’s take on Kuspit is perfectly plausible, I find it unconvincing in terms of Eileen Lawrence’s interests and concerns. As McLeod herself notes, Lawrence has a deep and long-standing interest in eastern art and philosophy and, as Macmillan notes, her approach is closer in orientation to Jung and Buddhism than Freud. Sarah Kent, in a perceptive essay for Lawrence’s 1992 exhibition, supports this view when she likens Lawrence’s titles for earlier works to Japanese haiku poems, as with the two titles quoted earlier. It’s also worth keeping in mind that Lawrence absorbed the twin influences of Joseph Beuys, a cofounder of the German Green Party, and Agnes Martin. Martin’s greatest spiritual inspiration was Lao Tzu’s teachings on Taoism, with its emphasis on the transcendence of nature and integration of body and mind.

Add to these affinities Kent’s suggestion that Lawrence’s work has a playful affection for mindsets that the modern world has no time for; mindsets for which “temples housed oracles… branches were dead ancestors and geese the companions of goddesses”, and a sense of what underpins what appear to be, in terms of their literal content, apparently simple images, starts to emerge. Kent also suggests that there’s a certain curiosity, mingled with admiration, about belief systems that still haunt the peripheral spaces of a world reduced by consumerist culture to a mere resource, to a standing reserve to be either extracted for profit or – whether human or more-than-human – disposed of if it interferes with making profit. Here Lawrence’s orientation is paralleled by John Burnside’s, thus aiding my speculations about the relevance of Lawrence’s work to Burnside’s musings on questions of self and mortality.      

John Burnside         

All in all, I think of Eileen Lawrence’s work as appearing at the convergence of these types of alternative orientation. Sarah Kent is obviously right to reference the trace sense of ancient goddesses, the pre-Christian antecedents of the Virgin Mary, in her discussion of Isis (1991). But even so I don’t see the work as wearing a “pagan” or “animist” approach on its sleeve. Perhaps because there is also present in it, as Duncan Macmillan observes,  something of the near-scientific exactitude of a work like John Ruskin’s Study of a Peacock Feather, c. 1880. In her working methods Lawrence has also shared Ruskin’s observational practice based on walking. As already mentioned, she has often visited remote places to study. Early on, in the Highlands, this was to collect feathers, heather twigs, egg shells and the materials with which to make her own paper. Later, in the US and Europe, these trips seem to have been more observational in intent. If she can’t be said to be concerned, like Ruskin, with revealing the glory of the Divine in the order of the universe, I think she’s certainly concerned with the importance of being open to the sense of mystery in the more-than-human world, to something that exceeds what can be grasped through scientific understanding yet, paradoxically, becomes apparent through qualities of observation that require an exactitude also valued by science.

As I hope my speculations so far suggest, Eileen Lawrence’s work might help us better face our current socio-environmental crisis. Kuspit’s “The Only Immortal”, with its Freudian underpinning, was published in 1990, yet between 1985 and 1989 the psychologist Edward Sampson published three papers that challenge the assumptions about the Self that Kuspit takes for granted. Sampson’s argument was later utilised by the archetypal psychologist James Hillman in a 1994 paper in which he argues that we need to understand that Self is “the interiorization of community”, that it’s ”constituted of communal contingences”, and that this requires us to take in, to notice, to attend to our environment in all its complexity because the environment is now the mirror in which Self as community appears. (See ‘“Man is by nature a political animal” or: patient as citizen’ in Sonu Shamdasani, S & Munchow, M (eds) Speculations after Freud: Psychoanalysis, philosophy and culture Routledge, 1994, pp. 35 -36).

This relates directly to Kuspit’s observations about the struggle between life and death instincts. If, as Hillman writes (quoting Sampson): “There are no subjects who can be defined apart from the world; persons are constituted in and through their attachments, connections, and relationships” then, as Hillman himself goes on to write: “understanding the individual as individual is no longer relevant to understanding human life”. (ibid. pp. 32-33). Provoking as many people (perhaps particularly artists) may find that claim, it makes clear that, ecologically speaking, the Freudian view of personhood is anachronistic, along with its conceptualisation of a struggle between life and death instincts to which Kuspit refers. If the expression of a life instinct lies in engagement with all the many and various attachments, connections, and relationships within which that life is enmeshed, then our literal, physical, death will not be the immediate end of those attachments, connections, and relationships. Why is implied by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur in his Critique and Conviction (!998) where, in response to a question about the Christian afterlife, he says: ”…I demand no ‘after’. I cast upon others, my survivors, the task of taking up again my desire to be, my effort to exist, in the time of the living”. (p. 158). I would also suggest that we might now understand the life instinct, in the light of Sampson’s observations, in terms that reflect the spirit of Bruno Latour’s injunction that we try: “to register, to maintain, to cherish a maximum number of alternative ways of belonging to the world”. (Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime 2018, p. 15-16).   

All of which may seem to take me a long way from Lawrence’s work. However, I will try to reconnect these speculations to that work in the next part of this essay.

For those of us living in the UK, today is our chance to vote for those who will represent us in the UK government over the next few years. Whichever party that is will have a very steep hill to climb, given the consequences of Brexit and the way in which the Tories have created what one commentator has called a “chumocracy” and have effectively asset-stripped the country, presumably on the basis of Margaret Thatcher’s belief that there is “no such thing as society”. (Only, it would appear from the policies of the last 14 years, rule by wealthy individuals and their friends animated by a sense of self-entitlement and greed).

Our democracy is very far from perfect. However, you only have to look at the USA, where a former president who attempted to deny his defeat by force has just effectively been given the power to make himself an absolute dictator (that is, to be placed above the law) should he win the elections there, to see that it could be a lot worse here. I wouldn’t presume to suggest how, as a UK citizen, you should vote. That is absolutely your choice on the basis of your convictions, circumstances, and what you feel is best for the country. Like a great many people, I find myself torn between voting from personal conviction – which would be to vote for the Green candidate (who, I know, has no chance of winning in the constituency where we live) – and voting for the hard-working and very decent Labour candidate who has served our constituency well for many years. In the end I will take the pragmatic option and vote Labour. If he is re-elected I will, however, continue to press him on Green and other issues.

The point of all this is, however, to ask any of you who think voting is a waste of time to please do so regardless. If we want a better, more representational, democracy – one in which, for example, we have proportional representation and greater devolved powers to regional and local communities – then we have to accept that it’s the duty of citizens to vote. If nothing else, it puts us in the position to be able to say: “I voted for you, now I expect you to listen to my concerns”.