I am fascinated by the possibilities of artist’s books. I’ve made a few and at one stage set up a little publishing enterprise called Wild Conversations Press. (It faded away because I have no business sense whatsoever). More recently, I’ve used this website to “publish” what I would once have turned into some form of artist’s book. Although doing this is simpler than paper-based publishing, costs readers nothing, and is almost certainly better for the environment, I do miss the physical qualities of a book I can hold in my hands.

A while back I read the American poet and environmental writer Barbara Hurd’s Listening to the Savage: River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies (2016) and was intrigued by her including short phrases she had heard her granddaughter Samantha say. They sounded like lines from poems. Two summers ago, re-reading the book, I noted down some of those phrases and then used them as a starting point for making a series of small images, most of which were not finished until this summer and some of which have been abandoned. Here are some that I’ve kept.

I ended the first part of this piece by summarising my argument in terms of needing to better understand, and then to resist, the “Strict Father’ framing mentality in connection with silly generalisations that distort the complexities of necessary debate. I then suggested that engaging with poetry may be one way to help ourselves do that. Here I want to take up that notion.

Back in 1995 Simon Schama reminded his readers that: ‘to take the many and several ills of the environment seriously does not … require that we trade in our cultural legacy or its posterity’ (1995: p.18). Consequently I’ll start with a relevant aspect of that cultural legacy, the standard claim made against poetry by political activists: namely that it changes nothing. Those making this claim often support it by referencing the second section of W.H. Auden’s poem In Memory of W. B. Yeats (d. Jan. 1939),which includes the line: ‘… poetry makes nothing happen…’ (An argument that ignores what Auden wrote in the poem that follows it – In Memory of Ernst Toller (d. May 1939) – which is that: ‘We are lived by powers we pretend to understand’. But that, I think, is perhaps a separate issue).

In Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them (2016)Paula Meehan, a poet deeply concerned about both environmental and social issues, takes up what is said ‘about the failure of poets in the face of politics’. She argues that if, as Auden claims, ‘poetry makes nothing happen, maybe it stops something happening, stops time, takes our breath away…Maybe it’s like the negative space in a painting by which what is there is revealed, to be apprehended by human consciousness’ (p.19). I fear that increasing our capacity for wonder in the face of what is, however, is not going to cut much ice with those for whom only the actions about which they are passionate, only literally “making something happen”, counts as worthwhile.  

Another poet, John Burnside, who was also passionately concerned with environmental issues, takes up the question of Auden’s claim in rather more detail. In The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century (2021) he points out that those in the English-speaking world who are happiest with seeing poetry as ‘marginal and ineffective’ dismiss it on the basis of ‘a fundamental misunderstanding of how poetry actually works, both on the individual imagination and in the social sphere’ (pp. 18-19). Burnside pointing out just how naïve it is to think that a poem, or a whole life-time writing poetry, could ‘change the world’. Rather, he insists, what poetry actually ‘does, first, is to survive… actively, on its own terms’. It is, he goes on to claim, ‘a way of being, a provider of context, an independent, non-oppositional, entirely autonomous state’. However, by that he does not mean that it has no communal role. Rather he sees it as a discipline, for both writer and reader; one that heightens attention to the world. He goes on: ‘This act of paying due attention is in itself a political act, for it enhances both our appreciative and our critical abilities, which are key to defining a position in a societal sphere in which both these faculties are currently at risk’ (pp.23-25). It’s at this point that I think his argument both aligns with Rebecca Solnit’s musings on the Left’s reaction against aesthetics and throws light on what I suspect is Monbiot’s real motive for making his silly claim about poetry.

It’s also the case, as Burnside goes on to point out, that what he argues about poetry applies equally to the literature and the humanities as ways of resisting what Jonathan Franzen calls ‘cultural totalitarianism’. I would want to add the visual arts to his list, although it’s of course often difficult to maintain his argument in relation to the visual; arts in the face of their increasing commercialisation and trivialisation by the pressures exerted by the “culture industry” and its various State-funded instruments. An industry hell-bent on merging the more “popular” aspects of the arts with commercial entertainment, while maintaining the supposedly “high” or “difficult” arts as fodder for forms of conspicuous consumption and elite posturing (much like “high” fashion). A world documented, if one’s willing to do some reading between the lines, in a book like Sarah Thornton’s 33 Artists in 3 Acts (2014). But all this leads into another whole line of thought, one that I’m not comfortable tackling but that, if I can get through and digest Justin O’Connor’s Culture Is Not An Industry: reclaiming art and culture for the common good (2024), I may feel obliged to return to.                            

Sometimes it’s a small thing that snags my attention and, like a thorn caught under the skin, it then has to be slowly worked out into the light of day.

Caroline Lucas begins the sixth chapter of Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story (2024), entitled ‘English Nature’, by quoting George Monbiot’s pronouncement, in Regenesis (2022)that: ‘One of the greatest threats to life on Earth is poetry’. For any number of reasons, not least because reading poetry helped me get through lockdown and because I choose to coordinate a small poetry-reading group that includes people who write poetry, that pronouncement struck me first as really silly and then as actually potentially dangerous.

One way of introducing what I want to set out in this essay is to suggest a major problem we now face is precisely the use of this type of silly, unqualified, “click-bait” generalisation, a habit that trivialises and so can seriously distort, very necessary debates about important issues, including about environmental issues that may well turn out to be matters of life and death.

I understand that, as a campaigning newspaper journalist who must produce regular copy, Monbiot needs to cultivate habits that enable him to hold the attention of readers and that one way of doing that, given his pitch, is to keep identifying and condemning new “greatest threats to life on Earth”. It was not unreasonable that, after Lula’s victory in the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, for example, he should have tweeted: “Bolsonaro was a threat not only to the lives of Brazilians, but to life on Earth.” I certainly wouldn’t quarrel with the basic sentiment behind that statement. However, as a particular individual politician Bolsonaro was one of a number of self-serving right-wing demagogues like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage; individuals who gain power and/or influence by divisively capitalising on people’s fears, prejudices and unreal desires. “Poetry”, on the other hand, is not of any one particular type, orientation, or set of qualities, not least because it’s been part of human expression across much of the world for several thousand years. (The first poems we know about, written by a woman named Enheduana who lived in what is now called Iraq around 2300 BCE, depict, for example, a world frighteningly subject to change, conflict, chaos, and contradiction beyond human control).

For Monbiot to make such a silly blanket generalisation about poetry, and for Lucas to repeat it, seems to me indicative of something more than just the use of a lazily provocative generalisation. What worries me is that, as a rhetorical habit, these are a milder variation on the kinds of generalised provocations used by Bolsonaro, Trump, Farage, and their kind. The same kind of generalisation, in the last analysis, as Trump’s absurd claim that all Mexicans are: “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists”.  

To be fair to Lucas, she doesn’t simply take Monbiot’s claim as given. She goes on to modify its sentiment so as to criticise what she sees as the effect of the ‘strong elegiac theme running through much of the literature of the English countryside, a mood of loss, mourning what has gone instead of fighting to protect what is left’ (p. 154). Again, I can’t really quarrel with the sentiment behind that view. However, the index of Lucas’ book lists ten references to the nineteenth-century poet John Clare, whose work she claims to admire as reflecting the insights of an ‘agricultural labourer with an intimate knowledge of the realities of rural life’ (p. 129). So how does she square her admiration for the poetry of John Clare with Monbiot’s characterisation of poetry as “one of the greatest threats to life on Earth”? I don’t believe she can, in which case it’s plain silly to use that click-bait quotation.

In an interview with Monbiot in Green European Journal , December 2022 the interviewer raises Monbiot’s generalisation about poetry: ‘you mean that our societies are clinging to a “ridiculous fantasy” of country life [which I presume is a phrase quoted from Monbiot], including the beauties of sheep and cattle herding’. To which Monbiot responds: ‘We have a real problem here that our perception of food policy is very dominated by aesthetics, by poetry, by pictures’. I don’t doubt that many people in the UK have a misplaced perception of the countryside, in no small part the result of a host of complicated historical and cultural factors. These include the war-time propaganda based on an ideal English rurality absorbed by my grandparents’ and parents’ generation, the way literature is traditionally taught in British schools, children’s books and, yes, the aesthetics of photographs, paintings, films, television, and advertising. But to simply dismiss the resulting perceptions as a “ridiculous fantasy” seems to me, at best, wildly patronising and, at worst and in terms of the psychosocial changes we urgently need to make, not just unhelpful but profoundly counter-productive. One question this begs, however, is just who do Monbiot and Lucas take to be their readers?

I suppose, as a lifetime member of the Green Party, I am one type of person they can reasonably expect to read what they write. My commitment to the Greens means that I understand and support both a good many of the changes they call for and, as it happens, share Lucas’ distrust of traditional elegiac pastoral themes. But that doesn’t mean I’m ready to accept silly, and ultimately dangerous, blanket generalisations. And I very much doubt I’m alone in this.

My view of Monbiot’s claim that “we” (?) have a serious problem in that “our” ‘perception of food policy’ is ‘dominated by aesthetics, by poetry, by pictures’, is that it’s underlying reductivism and negativity is informed by an attitude what Rebecca Solnit long ago identified in As Eve Said To The Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (2001). It’s a book I constantly return to because, as its title suggests (and like her earlier Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West), her understanding of issues of land and environment is firmly intersectional and inclusive. It’s for that reason that it includes her thoughts on why traditional Leftist thinking often has trouble with aesthetics including, that is, both poetry and beauty. 

Solnit argues that Western culture has had a problem with beauty ever since: ‘Thomas Aquinas disposed of it by asserting that the beautiful was the same as the good, which meant that it had no extramoral, no autonomous power at all’. This view was reinforced by the medieval notion that beauty ‘is mutable and therefore false’ (p. 83). These medieval notions connect in a number of ways to Monbiot‘s generalisation about poetry. One is suggested by Solnit’s understanding that those on ‘the Left would like to deny beauty as a motivating force altogether’ because they want to ‘deny the power of form and embrace content alone – as though the two were separable’. Like medieval moralists, many on the traditional Left seem to link formal beauty in the arts ‘with a corrupt seductiveness’ that might gain ‘power over us rather than we over it’. And here she goes on to identify what I take to be a fundamental issue. Many on the traditional Left enlist science and reason against what they see as the reactionary, emotional, irrationalism of Right-wing demagogies. They want not only ‘to reside in the rational space of the head’, but to weaponise an authoritarian view of reason itself. That inevitably opens them up to the implicit fear that to ‘be seduced’ by art ‘is to be reminded that there are things stronger than reason, than agenda’. A fear that haunts those on the Left animated by a vision of power where ‘authority is the desire to have the last word, to close the conversation’ (pp. 83-84). It’s on this basis that I think we should understand Monbiot’s hostility to poetry. That hostility would then be, at root, a fearful response to the fact that aesthetics, poetry, pictures, etc. have the power, in Solnit’s words, to keep the conversation open, to encourage us, where necessary, to ‘start all over again and again’ (p. 84). Poetry can be, in short, a challenge to the notion of “scientific” reason as a guarantee of authority.                

Monbiot claims to have read over 5,000 scientific papers before writing Regenesis. I can’t help thinking it’s a pity he’s not also read more widely. For example, Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory (1995) might have helped him understand something of the historical complexities and paradoxes that inevitably underpin environmental debates. It might even have helped him to have read more widely in the scientific literature. Of particular relevance here would be the work of the cognitive scientist and linguist George Lakoff. Lakoff is author of More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (1989) – written with Mark Turner ‘in the service of helping the study of poetry function to promote ethical, social and personal awareness’ (p. 214); The Political Mind (2008), which explores how underlying “framings” influence political debate, and the paper ‘Why it Matters How We Frame the Environment’ (2010). Unlike Monbiot Lakoff, a Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, understands that poets are craftspeople who ‘use basically the same tools we use’ when we speak or write, in particular in their use of metaphor as a form of thought that is ‘indispensable not only to our imagination but also to our reason’. He argues that poets, by using ‘capacities we all share’, are able to ‘illuminate our experience, explore the consequences of our beliefs, challenge the ways we think, and criticise our ideologies’ (1989: p. xi). The value of Lakoff’s work to a journalist or politician turned author would be, at the very least, that it demonstrate why progressive political arguments based on “objective”, “scientific” reasoning are simply not sufficient to change peoples’ minds. But I suspect, having read Lakoff, that Monbiot is too wedded to his belief in the absolute, “scientific” rightness of his own standpoint to genuinely listen to anyone who would challenge or critique his views.

I won’t attempt to summarise the many-stranded argument of The Political Mind here. What I can say is that my concern about Monbiot’s underlying attitude is that while he argues for what he sees as environmentally-sound social and political actions, he all-too-often does so using a rhetoric framed by what Lakoff calls the values of ‘The Strict Father Model’. There’s often nothing wrong, other than his over-emphatic emphasis, with the scientific content of Monbiot’s writing. My problem with it is that his rhetorical assumption of moral righteousness and unwavering belief in his own ability to identify the real sources of evil – anything from Welsh sheep to all the other “greatest threats to life on Earth” he’s named over the years. Underlying assumptions and a self-belief that belong to a mindset grounded in a strict, patriarchal, religious morality that can easily shade into totalitarianism.

As Simon Schama reminds us, writing about the management of woodland under the Third Reich, it’s ‘painful to acknowledge how ecologically conscientious’, and how heavily committed to conservation of the natural environment more generally, the Nazi regime actually was (p. 119). My point being that an absolute commitment to radical Green values is not incompatible with a totalitarian mentality. As Schama points out, the militant wing of Green politics struggles with ‘the normal processes of representative democracy’ because it sees its cause as ‘a revolutionary contestation with bourgeois capitalism for the fate of the earth’ and, in consequence, craves ‘the authority to impose salutary solutions’ for what it presents, not unreasonably as ‘a crisis of paramount importance’ (p. 119). My concern is that, if we care about the fate of the earth and are to find some way to address the “wicked problems” we now face, we will need to find ways of arguing our case that avoids a tacit endorsement of authoritarian attitudes, the greenwash of bourgeois capitalism, and the blind denial of environmental realities adopted by Right-wing demagogues.

To do that we’ll need to be clear that the strict, ultimately authoritarian, paternalism that in different ways frames both radical authoritarianism and right-wing demagogy is best contested by fostering a progressive Green ‘politics of empathy’ predicated on ‘protection, empowerment, and community’ (Lakoff, 2008: p.81). Lakoff argues that narratives ‘are brain structures that we can live out, recognise in others, and imagine, because the same brain structures are used for all three kinds of experience’ (p.93). If an individual or group constructs a self-identity based on internalising the Strict Father Model, he or they are unlikely to listen to, or empathise with, the narratives that are of vital importance to others because, like the Strict Father, they will be convinced that they know best. The result is then likely to be first withdrawal from debate and, ultimately, violent confrontation.

In Monbiot’s case, his insistence that he can and must argue so as to ‘close the conversation’ is underpinned by his belief that his arguments contain the scientific content makes his case incontestable. What this insistence has meant is that, when he tries to put his ideas into practice in contexts where others frame the values of landscape and memory differently, things inevitably go wrong. This happened with his attempts to substantially “re-wild” the Welsh uplands. (See my posts on this blog from 08.03 2022). The problem of a rhetoric based in an unacknowledged “Strict Father” framing, and in particular its implications for any hope of achieving real change, are at the heart of what lies behind my concern about Monbiot’s silly generalisation about poetry.

Of course I fully acknowledge that, for Monbiot and for those Greens for whom he can do no wrong, all this will be an irrelevance, a distraction from winning the argument set out in Regenesis. That being the case, it’s important to add that none of what I have written above means that I dispute the broader trajectory of that argument – namely that we need to radically change how our food is produced. Rather, my concern is that Monbiot’s argument is undermined by underlying assumptions about himself and others, including his contempt for those whose view of country life he dismisses as a “ridiculous fantasy”. That it’s possible to propose alternative routes towards similar ends to Monbiot’s, but without evoking contempt for the historical situation of ordinary people or their attitudes, is suggested by a book like Colin Tudge’s Six Steps Back to the Land (2016).

In short, my argument here boils down to our needing to better understand, and then to resist, evocations of the “Strict Father’ framing mentality, whether we encounter them in the generalisations of a “man of the Left” like Monbiot or of the Right-wing demagogies he quite rightly criticises. Engaging with poetry is, in my view, just one way in which we can help ourselves do both those things. The “how and why” of that claim is the subject of the second part of this essay.

A week ago, when the effects of racist riots were felt all over Britain, I had an online  conversation with Mohamud Mumin, a co-founder and artistic director at Soomaal House of Art, who is also an artist working in photography. We had been introduced virtually by an old friend of mine, Prof. Christine Baeumler at the University of Minnesota, who had suggested that Mohamud get in touch with me to talk about our shared interests in place-based initiatives and deep mapping as positive forms of place-making. Forms that have the potential to strengthen links between communities, rather than generate the kinds of division that were all over the media – here and in relation to the presidential elections in the USA.

I remember noticing a large number of Somalis when I visited Minneapolis St. Pauls some fifteen years ago, but did not know then that the city has the largest Somali diaspora population outside Africa. I learned from taking with Mohamud a little about the ways in which he and others at Soomaal House which, as an organisation, has been built up from scratch, are fostering creative expression and cultural understanding within the Minnesotan East African community. 

I find the degree to which various crude and reductive nationalisms allied to racism have been used to generate a rhetoric of hatred in across Europe, in the USA, the Middle East, India and elsewhere using lies and distortions to feed prejudice, deeply depressing. So it was very cheering to find positive common ground and shared values with Mohamud, who is dedicating his time and energy to encourage, support and educate for a broader, deeper perspective on the world, one that unites rather than divides.  

One of the things that cultural work at its best provides is ways of “translating” thoughts and feelings grounded in very different mentalities. This in turn can help us address what Paul Ricoeur calls: ‘the danger of incommunicability through … protective withdrawal’. A withdrawal that results from refusing to look beyond internalised and fixed attitudes embedded in a given mentality. Shared cultural work and enquiry can give us the ability and willingness to translate and mediate, through creative conversations, between distinct mentalities that are deeply entangled with heritages, both our own and those of others. This relates to the first of Paul Ricoeur’s three models ‘for the integration of identity and alterity’, namely ‘the model of translation’. Also to George Steiner’s observation that translation is central to both culture and consciousness. A view that leads him to argue that, without translation, ‘we would live in arrogant parishes bordered by silence’. This is one significant reason why we need to see the activities we categorise as “the arts” not as the “product” of a “culture industry”, but rather as one vital way in which we can help to cultivate what Ricoeur calls ‘a translational ethos’. An ethos that is central to any society that aspires to being a genuine democracy and one that we need to do all we can to promote.

[N.B All images reproduced in this section are copyright and 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].

Acceptance: greeting the animal

‘Why do they come to us, the animals? What do they want, inhabiting our dreams’?

James Hillman (in James Hillman & Margot McLean Dream Animals San Francisco, Chronical Books 1997, p. 13).

Ken Kiff Acceptance

Gerhard Richter has claimed that nature is always against us, knows no meaning, pity, or sympathy, because it is absolutely mindless so the antithesis of the human. That Richter’s claim that nature is “mindlessness” now appears somewhat over-simplistic, as the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn has amply demonstrated, is ultimately secondary here. I reference it because it duplicates the mindset of the Western status quo as predicated on assumptions that the Enlightenment inherited from Christianity. These assumptions include the presupposition that nature is lower than and opposed to, human culture; something to transcend, conquer, tame, or exploite. As already indicated, a significant aspect of Kiff’s work lies in his rejection of such assumptions in favour of an inclusive sense of inter related wholeness.

Kiff much admired Sienese painting so will have known Sassetta’s Wolf of Gubbio in the National Gallery in London, an image in which St. Francis takes the wolf’s paw so as to ratify an agreement negotiated on behalf of the townspeople of Gubbio. This visual evocation of a contractual parity between a human and animal is, to my knowledge, unique in Western iconography. As such, it points directly to the quiet, but profoundly radical, nature of Kiff’s painting Acceptance and the images related to it. However, while the topic of The Wolf of Gubbio is significant here, the strict division between urban and natural space in Sassetta’s painting is the antithesis of the unified space in Acceptance. Given his interest in Indian art, it is possible that Kiff also recalled any number of ragamala paintings, many of which depict empathetic face-to-face meetings between a single person and one or more animals – deer, birds, a snake, a bull, etc. If so, these may have influenced his development, over a decade, of the cluster of paintings evoking such meetings that includes Acceptance, given that they show striking similarities of format, simplification, colour and imaginative tenor. (I have in mind works like the Basohli ragamala painting Pancham Raga, c. 1690-1695, reproduced in W.G. Archer’s Indian Paintings from the Punjab Hills 1973, 28, no. 14 (ii). Archer had been Keeper of the Indian Section, Victoria and Albert Museum, London and this work was formally in his private collection).   

Ken Kiff Elements with salamander (Sequence 43)

Acceptance, begun in 1967 and extensively reworked between 1975-8, occupies a pivotal place in Kiff’s work, not least because of its emphatic title. (Kiff’s normal practice was simply to name the entities that form a work’s topic). Acceptance is one of six works begun in 1965 on square boards primed with heavy gesso. In two others, a naked man also communes with a non-human being (a salamander and a fish respectively). Acceptance reworks and simplifies the topic of the earlier Elements with Salamander (S. 43), probably begun in 1972, with its salamander’s inter-elemental associations (they are traditionally associated with fire), and its emergence from water onto land and into air. Kiff also further develops the dominant yellow of the earlier work into an all-embracing, glowing yellow field, which is only qualified in the tree and the small area where the blue of the pool moves through a transitional green that runs through the head and shoulders of the emergent lizard.

Ken Kiff Man and salamander

To understand what is implied by the title Acceptance, we must reference Kiff’s other works that evoke meetings between humans and animals. These include Pink Man and Green Lizard, 1966-70, and Man and Fish, 1968-70 in the same group, together with numerous significant Sequence images. Ubu, Salamander and symbol (S. 134), probably started around the same time as Acceptance was reworked, reconfigures the meeting in the earlier Elements with Salamander (S. 43), where the relationship between the figures is more tentative. The pensive figure in the earlier work is replacing by Alfred Jarry’s anti-hero Ubu, dressed as a portly English gentleman who tentatively reaches out towards a salamander that looks back at him as it walks away on its hind legs. The predominately yellow palette of the earlier work is now restricted to the hill behind Ubu, emphasising the contrast between the figure and the salamander. The inclusion of Ubu – a figure known for his infantile engagement with the world – has today taken on an additional resonance. We might remember, for example, that the UK establishment spends many billions of pounds a year subsidising a fossil fuel industry directly linked both to human deaths from air pollution and to conflict and ecocide across the globe.     

Ken Kiff Ubu, Salamander and symbol (Sequence 134)

The salamander or lizard that reoccurs in many of Kiff’s works from this period also plays an important role in Bonnefoy’s series of poems Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve, suggesting possible ways of reading its recurrence in Kiff’s work. John Naughton draws particular attention to Lieu de la salamandre in his exploration of Bonnefoy’s concern with ‘incarnation’, the state of being he links to moments of: ‘epiphany and oneness’ when we may become conscious of an intuition of the co-existence of the eternal and the here-and-now. This may be as close as we can get to describing the overall mood of Acceptance and related paintings.

Man in desert (Sequence 119)

This does not, of course, limit the many different resonances that attach to the loose cluster of paintings that includes Acceptance. Man in desert (S. 119), begun the same year Kiff resumed work on Acceptance, is a powerful articulation of his view of human/animal relationships. The painting freely reworks the traditional Christian iconography of St Jerome with a lion in the desert, and is indicative of Kiff’s radical unsettling and reconfiguration of traditional presuppositions. Man in desert  reverses the traditional Christian presuppositions of the Great Chain of Being, the hierarchy descending down from God, through the angels, to man, down through woman, to the natural world, concepts that would inform Western culture’s belief in its own exceptionalism, in the superiority of humans over animals, and in various gender differences. The iconography of Kiff’s image directly questions the hierarchical distinction between human saint and lion. Here the lion is powerfully self-composed while the saint, who has acquired the head of a donkey, appears ill at ease as he lifts his eyes from his book, perhaps to contemplate the Miro-like twined signs that float above. Saint and lion are linked by a sweep of blue (a river or stream?) which, in its colour, echoes the crescent form in the abstract configuration above (the “elements” named in Sequence 43).

In conversation Kiff referred to this Miro-like configuration as “the parallelogram and spike”. Although I pressed him on a number of occasions about its specific significance, his response was always ambivalent. He seems to have had two distinct lines of thoughts regarding this configuration. One related to earth, air, fire and water. The other to the material, the elements, from which a painting is made; literally the flat rectangle support, but also brushstrokes, colour, intervals between forms and their echoes, each of the basic aspects of what a painting does. These, then, along with what these evoke in the world. He added that he thought of these elements as a chemist or physicist might, and sometimes thought of them as ‘molecules’. While I understand the reasons for Kiff’s ambivalence, I also think it’s possible to suggest more about the function of the parallelogram and spike in his images, together with its relevance to the cluster of works in which it appears, many of them related to Acceptance.  

Ken Kiff Sun-moon and flower (watercolour)

Elements with Salamander (Sequence no. 43) marks the first appearance of the parallelogram and spike and, unusually, names it as “elements”. The configuration subsequently appears with some variations throughout Kiff’s work, in each case relating to the image as a whole in ways analogous to the placing of figures of Saints or the Virgin in the vernacular art of Catholic retablos. As such, it evokes a sense of another, nameless but perhaps numinous, dimension to the image – one that is, however, without a prior, given, meaning but perhaps analogous to the pairing of yin and yang, the opposing yet complementary forces of Daoism. Any such identification must, however, remain provisional since, in the watercolour Sun-Moon and flower (1997), the title identifies the parallelogram and spike with the sun and moon. I would argue however that the Daoist analogy is not incompatible with Kiff’s inflection of his ‘elements’ as ‘molecules’. The writer Jeremy Lent supports this when he reminds us that Song dynasty Chinese thinkers rejected all notions of transcendent meaning in favour of seeing it as intrinsic to the world all about them. He also notes that their philosophy both remains relevant today and that it shows a remarkable correspondence with findings in contemporary systems and complexity science. There is insufficient space here to pursue the parallels between this claim and the concerns Kiff shares with Bonnefoy. However, I hope their potential is sufficiently clear to encourage any interested reader to explore them further if they so wish.  

In this and the previous section I have touched on synergies between Kiff’s work and Bonnefoy’s concern with the world in its concrete appearing. For Bonnefoy language breaks up the evidence of the world by extracting it from the place of its being, arguing that when we stop reading any text, we of necessity ‘become painters’ because, in the moment we raise our eyes from the text to see the world in its concrete visibility. (A movement that might also be linked back to discussion of Kiff’s images’ in relation to dinnsheanchas). A world of hope and despair, life and death, love and loneliness, because the true painter accepts the world as it is, greets it, opens her or his painting to light and colour, to all the phenomena of the real, which then enter the painting from the world beyond the painting, and in the process make visible how they have entred so that work and world coexist in a constant dialogue and exchange.

It is here that, perhaps, we approach a fuller sense of what works like Acceptance evoke. That Kiff regarded this act – of raising of our eyes from the page (whether written or drawn on) so as to see the world in its concrete visibility – as vitally important is, I think, implicit not only in Man in desert (S. 119), but in images such as Energies (S. 46), Unlikely Angel (S. 67), Typing in the garden (S. 93), Writing (S. 97) and, perhaps most explicitly, in the large pastel Tree with black trunk and person reading (1990). While Bonnefoy identifies this “seeing the world in its concrete visibility” with the work of the painter, I suggest that in terms of a current reading of Kiff’s work, we need to take this thought a little further.

Ken Kiff Tree with black trunk and person reading (pastel)

Another Modernity?

In this essay  I have tried to show how Ken Kiff departed from the mentality underpinning the post-1955 orthodoxies of Modernist visual culture by creating an expanded realism that evokes the process of rediscovering, reclaiming, and bringing into being a new wholeness, one inclusive of both the life inside and outside a self grounded in relationality. I have also indicated how this relates to his sense of the Feminine and, drawing on Martha Kapos, to love. Arguably, then, his work belongs to quite another sense of modernity; one that might in part be identified with the Nobel-winning poet Octavio Paz’s notion of a place where all time, whether past or future, real or imaginary, becomes pure presence and who, in his linking of the present to presence, exactly echoes Yves Bonnefoy’s understanding of incarnation. But only if, along with the poets John Burnside and Randall Jarrell, that sense of presence is seen as inseparable from ‘the dailiness of life’.

If Kiff is to be considered some kind of visionary, this is surely the nature of his vision. Norbert Lynton, Kiff’s long-time critical supporter and friend, observed that: ‘He knew a lot and knew more profoundly than most, for the simple reason that he cared immeasurably. This dual activity, caring through his work and caring through attention, was central to him’. (Thinking about Ken’ in Andrew Lambirth Ken Kiff London, Thames and Hudson 2001, p.8).

This suggests that, for Kiff, making art was never simply a professional activity, but part of a larger caring in which aesthetic concerns were a means, not an end. A way of understanding his relationship to the world at large that is comparable, in a strictly this-worldly, incarnate sense, to that of a traditional icon painter. If that is the case, Lynton’s reference to Kiff’s immeasurable care, which we might also call love understood as agape, begs the question: care or love for, and attention to, who or what? A question that extends the one implicit in Jeremy Deller’s claim that all good artists are socially engaged.

Kiff’s images articulate a concern for the innumerable internal conflicted, and shifting desires, ideals and interests of  human beings in all their complexity; for qualities that, if properly understood and respected, wholly undermine the stereotypical binary of “Us” and “Them” fundamental to current exploitation, inequality and injustice globally. Through making such images, Kiff engaged with processes that permeate all areas of human life in a variety of forms and shapes that cannot be conceptually delimited. They can be visualised, however, as a net of connected relations spreading in all directions without any set trajectory. This echoes those human processes that change as we come use, interpret, reuse and understand them, the processes I suggest The Sequence was intended to evoke. Far from simply painting his own idiosyncratic nightmares, as John Hoyland claimed he did, Kiff was in fact contesting the presuppositions that, as we are now coming to understand, link the climate crisis to a crisis of culture, and finally of imagination; the same understanding that underwrites Amitav Ghosh’s analysis of the roots of the Great Derangement, the consequences of which derangement we are now increasingly suffering.

Kiff’s art evokes what is overlooked or repressed by those with most to gain from maintaining a politics and economics underpinned by possessive individualism, while obscuring their own complicity in that Great Derangement. Their continuation of a modernity that repurposed, rather than broke with, previously religiously sanctioned exceptionalism and hierarchy. The deeply embedded hierarchies of value and entitlement encoded in, and so ultimately reinforced by, much of the West’s visual art. A visual tradition that Kiff, in the spirit of early modern painting, worked to refigure and revalue through a radical visual polysémie that was also open to the cultural values that underwrite the visual traditions of the Indian sub-continent and China. In doing so, he perhaps anticipated Bruno Latour’s insistence that what really counts today, when we must face the possibility of the collapse of our psychic, social and natural ecologies, is to understanding whether we can ‘managing 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 Cambridge, Polity Press 2018, 93-95 & 16.

This is, surely, as good a way as any to understand the immeasurable sense of care that animates Kiff’s work? 

Ken Kiff Green hill

Coda

I started writing the original essay from which this version is derived in less troubled times. Revisiting it now, during deepening social unease shading into fear and worsening environmental decline, has at times led me to doubt the value of doing this. Against that background I have to set Ken Kiff’s dedication, not only to his own work but to a belief in the value and benefit of the free exercise of an attentive and inclusive imagination as a fundamental human necessity. There is also my sense that life, and perhaps the human world itself, would be impossibly diminished without the many and various arts that help us attend to, value, and so learn to genuinely care for, the world. That remind us that there are values iother than those of the economic bottom line, naked self-interest, lust for power over others, and so on.

Sitting quietly with the reproduction of Ken Kiff‘s Green hill, with its tiny figure going down into a darkness that is also a route to what nourishes the natural world, and with the memory of the vastness of the hill above, is somehow a confirmation that, however difficult the times, it is possible to find a sense of necessary continuity, of the need for care for those who will, hopefully, come after us.

[N.B All images reproduced in this section are copyright and courtesy 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].

The Sequence, images for Folk Tales of the British Isles, and others reconsidered.

Ken Kiff Cottage in a field (Sequence 106)

The Sequence, begun in 1971 and still incomplete at Kiff’s death in 2001, consists of almost two hundred loosely cross-related images. A highly unusual body of work for which there are no close parallels, it sits right at the heart of his achievement as an artist. It has been written about in some detail by Norbert Lynton, Martha Kapos, Ken Kiff and myself in Ken Kiff’s Sequence, published in 1999, and subsequently by various other writers (largely in passing) but also, more recently, in considerable detail by Emma Hall. Because of the volume of images it contains, along with the scope of its subject-matter, The Sequence is not an easy work to discuss. Kiff himself spoke of it primarily in musical terms. I sense, however, that there was a certain defensiveness in this choice, perhaps a consequence of the unusual nature of its underlying topics and the largely uncomprehending or dismissive critical reception of his work when The Sequence was begun. With hindsight, and in addition to the important musical aspect of the work, I would now suggest that Kiff may also have had in mind a number of possible visual models. Given his interests, these might well have included early Sienese predella panels, Galway Kinnell’s 1968 translation of Yves Bonnefoy’s long poem Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve, and examples of the tradition in the Indian subcontinent of artists making series of musically-themed miniatures known as Ragamala paintings. It’s important to note however that Kiff himself, when speaking with the artist Wynn Jones, referred to The Sequence as his attempting to produce a form of painterly thinking not previously undertaken before.

In the wider cultural context, Kiff is perhaps best understood as a visual thinker whose trajectory, while quite distinct in its form, converges with that of a number of other thinkers. With the work of the poets already mentioned, with Gaston Bachelard, with Paul Ricoeur’s thinking regarding the multiplicities of meaning in metaphor and image, and with the post-Jungian thinker James Hillman, who writes of the soul that it is ‘ceaselessly talking about itself, in ever-recurrent motifs in ever-new variations, like music’. (Re-visioning Psychology New York, Harper Collins 1977, p. xvi.) Hillman is here acknowledging the “polytheistic” or “animistic” consciousness located in multiple figures and persona, rather than in terms of the privileged relationship to the individual ego that characterises the “Expressionist” understanding of art and, indeed, helps underwrite the culture of possessive individualism. The visual thinking set out in The Sequence also parallels Hillman’s understanding that authenticity requires ‘the perpetual dismemberment of being and not-being a self’; the acknowledgement of a mode of being that ‘is always in many parts, like a dream with a full cast’. (Healing Fiction Woodstock, Spring Publications Inc. 1983, p. 39).    

Ken Kiff Love and shadow (Sequence 30)

I suggest that this parallel offers perhaps the best way to approach, for example, the status of male figures resembling Kiff himself who appear in many of The Sequence’s images as this figure may relate to the persona of the artist. As a “dreamer” in the sense set out earlier Kiff is, at the very least, both himself-as-the-artist-making-the-work and his ‘double’, one among the many disparate beings that populate The Sequence. Yves Bonnefoy asks, in an essay of the greatest importance to Kiff, who it is that we struggle against in creative work if not our own double? Is it not against the other in us who would have us feel that the world has no meaning, that creative work is irrelevant? Ní Dhomhnaill’s view of the connection between her personal life and what comes down to her ‘through the language and through folklore’ may be also be helpful here. In acknowledging a reciprocity in which the development of the tradition through its personalisation by an individual, and the enrichment of an individual through engaging with the tradition, the maker is distanced from any exclusive focus on the “heroic” ego of possessive individualism and remains, instead, within the living flow of an ever-changing cultural tradition. For Kiff, “tradition” is nothing less than the entire imagery of a Western culture still haunted by the myths of Classicism and Christianity. An imagery in need of being simultaneously extended and re-visioned, in no small part through the artist’s referencing of parallels and possibilities latent in quite other cultures, so as to help free us into a new polysémie better attuned to a more inclusive understanding of a shared world.

Ken Kiff Typing in the garden (Sequence 93)

In this context it is worth identifying something of the range of cultural material referenced in The Sequence. (For reasons of space, I will not touch on Kiff’s use of a wide range of “formal” themes, for example the red/green polarity associated with the late medieval and Renaissance art of northern Europe, which he employs in thevarious portraits in which it is included). The Sequence references Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland, Classical and Biblical imagery, the works of Poussin, Goya, and De Chirico, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu, the poets Rilke, Yeats, and Mayakovsky, the actor W.C. Fields, Greek popular folk puppets, and variations on his own images made to accompany the stories in Folktales of the British Isles. All of which references are woven into evocations of a variety of everyday events such as leaving home, eating, sexual activity, walking in the street, excreting, taking pleasure in the experience of people, animals and objects, the acts of writing and drawing, receiving help or healing, spitting, traveling, reading, aging, being ill and communing with the dead.

I believe that the images Kiff made for Michael Foss’ Folk Tales of the British Isles (1977) are best seen as translations; as invitations to discover the rich, complex and nuanced world inhabited by those in the past whose worldviews differed from our own. If we look at three of these folktale images –  No one dared go near the hill, It was surely some man that was in that dog, a soul in trouble and He went through the wood on an old lame white horse (see the three images below) – and compare these to, say, Arthur Rackham’s fairy tale illustrations, we at once see a fundamental difference of approach. While Rackham employs a generic style that, at the level of “language”, homogenises the distinct tones and feelings of different stories, Kiff focuses on “translating” the qualities of each tale as he experiences it by seeking out an appropriate visual equivalent. The artist and writer John Berger’s discussion of ‘true translation’ is useful here.

Berger points out that translation is not a two-way transaction between two languages but is in fact a triangular act, its third point being the experience that animated the text to be translated prior to it being written. Translation, then, is predicated on an empathy that seeks to return to our pre-verbal experience through a study of the original work; one that reaches through to, touches, whatever vision or experience originally prompted that work. That sensing of another’s pre-verbal experience must then be used to ground choices about the language into which the original is to be translated. In this way the translator can persuade that second language to absorb and welcome what is to be articulated. Berger continues, in terms that can be applied directly to Kiff’s images for Folk Tales: that non-verbal languages of signs, behavior and spatial accommodation are related to ‘(rhymes with?)’ ‘a mother tongue’. (See John Berger The Guardian Review, Saturday 13^th December, 2014, p. 17).

To approach Kiff’s Folk Tales images as translations is consistent with his sensing of reality as experienced by an ensembled self, one aware of multiplicity at every level, rather than a reality reduced to fixed concepts or represented through a single, signature style. The Sequence has, perhaps rightly, overshadowed the sixty plus paintings and drawings that Kiff made for Folk Tales (not all of which appeared in the final publication). However, I suggest that making visual “translations” of those tales reinforced Kiff’s ability to transgress modernity’s insistence on an absolute distinction between humans and animals, the living and the dead, between body, psyche and spirit, and so on. In doing so, it facilitated his ability to evoke interactions between “the other world” and the everyday, reinforcing the fluid sense of reality that makes The Sequence a multi-layered collective psychodrama continuously being remade and renewed. (In this respect it might be related to the novels of Madeline Miller, with their remaking of the Homeric world so as to reconfigure its values in ways that can now speak directly to our own most urgent need for deep adaptation). Nor did Kiff’s interest in translating folk topics end with the commission for Folk Tales, as a large later charcoal drawing like The road past the goblin’s house (1991) below demonstrates.

Ken Kiff The road past the goblin’s house (Photo by Angelo Plantamura)

Seen in the way I am suggesting, The Sequence and Folk Tales appear as the two aspects of a single project; with the first relating more to the development of a tradition through its personalisation, and the second to an enrichment of the individual through emersion in manifestations of the cultural psyche evoked by folk material. Taken together, they illuminate a new (or possibly very old) way of exploring the fluid, shifting nature of human identity and the elusive, mercurial, echoing reminders that flow from “the other world”, so as to enlarge and extend our multiple selves in relation to a shared polyverse.

Ken Kiff Orange sky (Sequence 187)

India and The Goddess paintings

In the summer of 1981, Ken Kiff travelled with his family to the Artist’s Camp established by Vivan Sundaram in Kasauli in northern India. A trip that, while not particularly productive for Kiff in terms of actual work made, nevertheless gained him friends among contemporary Indian artists and considerably extended his knowledge of both contemporary and traditional art in the Indian sub-continent. In September of the following year an exhibition of forty-four Indian artists, including the work of six who Kiff had met in India the previous year, took place at the Royal Academy of Arts. That exhibition strengthened Kiff’s contact with contemporary Indian art since, of those exhibiting, he had already engaged with Arpita Singh, Jagdish Swaminathan, Krishen Khanna, Manu Parekh and Vivan Sundaram at Kasauli.

Goddess-red-green

Commentators have frequently assumed, somewhat to Kiff’s irritation, that his Goddess paintings were the outcome of his Indian trip. This group of paintings and drawings – Goddess in the Street (1982-3), The Feminine as Generous, Frightening and Serene (1982-3), Woman Affecting the Everyday (1983) – certainly have parallels with Goddess images common within Hindu culture. They should be seen, rather, in the context of Kiff’s concern with such numinous female figures since the early 1970s, for example Goddess, attendant and cloak (S. 59), Yellow Woman in Street (c. 1975) and Goddess in Street (Narrow Version) (c. 1980). While Kiff’s red and green goddess painting may very well reference images of Kali or Chinnamasta, it also echoes long-standing concerns in Kiff’s work and, furthermore, was actually painted before he knew he was going to India. (It is possibly influenced by memories of an image in one of W.G. Archer’s many books on Indian art).

Ken Kiff Woman Affecting the Everyday

We should also keep in mind that, within the Western tradition, certain Christian saints have iconographic attributes that may ultimately be traced back to tales of both nurturing and destroying Goddesses that are part of a very old and common root in Indo-European folk culture. For example, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill refers in an essay to St. Catherine, from whose decapitated head milk flowed instead of blood, and to the fact that any number of Irish folktale motifs relate back to a primitive Indo-European unity. The writer on art Andrew Lambert has emphatically refuted the notion that Kiff opportunistically appropriating the imagery of a culture other than his own. I would add to his argument by suggesting that Kiff’s concerns in these paintings flow, like those of Gulammohammed Sheikh in his Kaavad: Travelling Shrine, from a quite proper desire to articulate a meaningful transcultural imaginative synthesis, one able to speak to fundamental shared concerns in our time. While the issue of appropriate is a complex and often thorny one, it is important to recognise that such acts have usually been part of a two-way traffic and have a very long history indeed. For example, the sculpture produced in India by the Gandhara school between the first and sixth century CE happily married Buddhist subjects and Indian iconography with stylistic influences derived from Greek and Roman works.      

The initial reception of Kiff’s Goddess works was decidedly mixed. Nicola Jacobs, with whose gallery he exhibited at the time, could not bring herself to like them. Indeed, they have sometimes been read as misogynistic or anti-feminist, a view Kiff emphatically rejected. He wrote to me that:

‘The “goddess” paintings I did: I heard a couple of girls in the gallery in which one was showing say, ‘He must hate women’. It’s the kind of thing which is very distressing. But I’d already asked my wife and daughter, and a number of women, including writers, at least one of them Indian, about these paintings of mine, and every one had said the paintings are pro-feminine’. (Letter to the author, 10th June, 1998).

While this clearly shows both Kiff’s sensitivities and a degree of empathy and support for these works from women viewers, for many viewers they none-the-less remain demanding images.

Perhaps the most “difficult” of this group of images in this respect is Woman Affecting the Everyday (1983), in which the figure is clear menstruating. The background to this image, as the artist’s daughter Anna Kiff has pointed out to me, is Kiff’s knowledge of the Mother Goddess Kamakhya, the ‘Bleeding Goddess’ as a significant focus in Tantric worship, whose temple in Assam is a famous pilgrimage site. In that context menstruation is revered as the ability of a woman to conceive and so as a celebration of this shakti within every woman. A reverence reinforced by the fact that, each June, the nearby Brahmaputra river turns red, which is taken to be an externalisation of the Goddess’ menstruation.

Perhaps understandably enough, Andrew Lambert avoids engaging with the psychosocial resonances of such images, focusing instead on what he sees as Kiff’s concern with the feminine within himself as an artist and on the Goddess as signifying the eruption into the everyday of the unknown’. Martha Kapos, by contrast, confronts their difficulty head-on in a catalogue essay for Kiff’s 1986 Arts Council travelling exhibition. In a detailed analysis of The Feminine as generous, frightening and serene, she acknowledges the relationship with images of the goddess Kali, but focuses on a hard-won melding – of the Indian image’s condensed and paradoxical nature with Kiff’s handling and colour – to articulate extremes of feeling. Through a detailed analysis of that articulation, she argues that the works loosen conventional forms by cutting through the apparent polarities enacted by bringing together senses of extreme vitality on one hand and extreme destructiveness on the other. She goes on to describe how the material aspect of the painting activates an awareness of new possible relationships of meaning that can provide an enhanced sense of reality, a new psychological truth that goes beyond the solely aesthetic in a way she compares to falling in love. Seen this way, this work and its companion pieces may stand as perhaps the most extreme examples of Kiff’s concern to articulate his sense of the Feminine in relation to that of wholeness in the sense of full psychic inclusivity.       

[N.B All images reproduced in this essay are copyright and courtesy The Estate of Ken Kiff and Hales London and New York. ©The Estate of Ken Kiff. All rights reserved, DACS 2024.No image should not be reproduced in any form without the permission of the Estate of Ken Kiff Ltd].

Wholeness

Ken Kiff The Radiant Woman (Sequence 185)

Ken Kiff saw the evocation of a sense of inclusivity or wholeness as the central challenge shared by visual art, poetry, and music. Typically, he used a Shakespeare sonnet to discuss the challenge involved in relation to his own work. He notes that the Shakespearean sonnet has: ‘… a syllabic construction but on top of that he overlays rhythms caused by alliteration, and another brought about by the relative force of the words, or by abrupt stops – then he might reverse some of the stresses. Shakespeare is a master because he can hold the basic structure in his subconscious all the time yet do all these other things too’; adding that the poet needs ‘all these structural things moving along’ in his own work, but needs them simultaneously ‘all flowing into one organic thing’. (quoted in Inge ‘2019 Archive interviews with painters: Ken Kiff’). This concern with wholeness as a confluence of multiple, tensioned, yet also closely related, elements becoming ‘one organic thing’ informed his work and was informed in turn by his reading very widely and in particular, according to his daughter Anna, his reading of Chinese philosophy. A philosophy that, unlike the elevation of the spirit/intellect over the bodily that characterises cultures based in the binary religious of the West, recommends a down-to-earth holism predicated on the observation that the heart-mind is nothing without the body and the body is nothing without the heart-mind. A view that can serve here to link Kiff’s search for wholeness with his commitment to a “realism of the psyche”.

A Realism of the Psyche

‘Elusive, mercurial, the unconscious is not a place, not a state, but a dark ironic brother, an echoing sister, reminding’.

James Hillman (On Paranoia Dallas, Spring Publications Inc. 1988, p. 41).

In Flight Out Of Time the Dadaist Hugo Ball writes of the search for new forms with which to depict the actualities of inner experience necessary to social and cultural renewal. A search that, starnge as it may now seem, united groups as apparently disparate as the Dadaists and the Jungian Psychological Club. In the visual arts that search was informed a wide range of aesthetic experiments, including the Orphic Cubism of Kupka, Delauney and Chagall. A key aspect of their experimentation, all-too-often misrepresented by Modernist art historians as the early pursuit of a “pure” abstraction, was in actuality the exploration of the evocative power of colour-as-a-felt-structuring, an approach that emerged in its earliest full form in Chagall’s work during his time in Paris. In an important article from 1985, Martha Kapos uses this element of Chagall’s work to challenge the presuppositions used to validate the re-emergence of figurative painting in exhibitions like Timothy Hyman’s 1979 Narrative Painting (which includes Kiff’s work) and the Royal Academy’s 1981 New Spirit in Painting (which did not).

Ken Kiff On brown

She sees the Neo-expressionist claim to ‘individual expression’ which underwrote not only European Neo-expressionist, Transavantgarde and, in time, much “post-modern” painting, as reactionary in the sense of being predicated on the notion that artists are wholly self-contained and exceptional individuals able to express a unique self-based vision in paint. A notion that, as she points out, entirely fails to acknowledge the larger psychosocial processes that help shape both self and work. She exempts Kiff and Chia from this criticism, however, citing their engagement with Cubism’s potential to both radically reorganise pictorial structures and to liberate colour so as to enable new, more open, forms of figuring reality in all its complexity. Adopting these concerns in turn enable them to challenge the ideological formation and control of given or assumed unities and continuities within both the self and the world by both opposing and transforming conventional presuppositions about representation. This “return” to a genuinely radical re-figuring of the painted image enhanced the poetic polyvalence of painting, allowing it to access new pictorial structures and, as a result, new ways of knowing and envisaging self and world. It is this that enables Kiff not only to break with expectations regarding self and world, but also to alter, expand, and altogether transform them; to undertake, in the phrase Kapos borrows from Chagall, a new ‘realism of the psyche’.

Ken Kiff Head incorporating blue space face towards the street

Kapos’ analysis of Chagall’s use of colour is fundamental to understanding the importance of his paintings to Kiff, but I would also want to stress the relevance of Chagall’s commitment to an inclusive approach to imagery. One that relates to his desire for art as ‘an open invitation to everyman to “look in his own way, interpret what he sees, and how he sees”’. The resulting balancing act, matching Cubism’s radical restructuring of the world with a sense of a common and inclusive reality, seems to me fundamental to Kiff’s approach. One that once again might be related to Ní Dhomhnaill’s concerns as an Irish-language poet with vivifying that language in a post-colonial context.

Or, equally, to the Indian artist Arpita Singh’s shift from non-figurative painting so as to submerge herself in the forms of Bengali folk art in the late 1970s, before moving on to draw together the possibilities she discovered in both types of work. I cite such parallels so as to offer a reminder that Kiff’s psychic realism is, in no small part, an attempt to overcome the alienation produced by the supposedly heroic “progressivism” and the absolutism within Western European and American Modernity; its ultimately authoritarian/colonialist insistence on subordinating all other ways of knowing, including alternatives within its own geo-political region, in an attempt to induce them to serve the reductively monolithic conception of reality that, in turn, serves global capitalism.

Drawing on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ní Dhomhnaill identifies two interlinked forms of this alienation: a self-distancing from a shared reality and a disassociation from the daily  language of interaction in home and community. Taken together these constitute a psychic fault-line all-too-easily denied or glossed over. I believe it was precisely to address this psychic fault-line that Kiff revisited the radical possibilities of early twentieth century painting when looking for the means to reimagine everyday life; possibilities that would enable him to refigure the world in terms of understanding that life as inclusive of both “inside” and “outside” worlds, and from the viewpoint of a multiple self. In so doing he attempted another kind of thinking, one articulated through the visual polysémie necessary to any genuine realism of the psyche. His visual poetics thus enabled him to evoke objects, animals, and human beings in the context of a relational sense of “home” and “community” in ways that parallel the richness and expressive potential that Ní Dhomhnaill draws from the use of her native Irish, over against the psychically-colonising language of English, so as to write a properly contemporary Irish poetry.

Against the grain

Above: Ken Kiff The Selection Committee’s Fear of the Irrational (Sequence 140)

Below: Ken Kiff The Conversation (Sequence 139)

Within his work as a whole, only a few of Kiff’s images – for example The Selection Committee’s fear of the irrational (S. 140) and The Conversation (S. 139) reproduced above – suggest something of his response to the prevailing critical culture within the visual arts in his time. Among other things, a dominant culture contemptuous of the direct articulation of psychic realities as these relate to daily interactions in the home and the community. In turn, the dominant art world culture’s perception of Kiff is all too apparent in the two comments directed at his work discussed below.

In 1980 the art critic Stuart Morgan suggested that: ‘to walk into a room of Ken Kiff paintings is like finding a grown man in tears at a bus stop’. He goes on to claim that, in such circumstances, ‘an excess of fellow feeling, well-meant but sentimental’ follows an initial coldness and distaste that makes it ‘doubly hard to sympathise with the stranger or to truly understand his problems’. He continues: ‘spectators like being permitted to condescend to artists, and Kiff, like the man at the bus stop, gives them every opportunity. They leave in a spirit of emotional largesse, confident that they have discovered a new Chagall or an L.S. Lowry’.

However, Morgan then goes on to identify what he sees as a central problem for reviewers of Kiff’s work such as himself. In doing so, he appears to distance himself from his own, rather convoluted, initial position, perhaps suspecting these may say more about his own personality than they do about Kiff’s work. He goes on to suggest that, while reviewers will ‘concede that Kiff is no naïf’, they will still face the problem that his concerns are not those ‘of any other advanced abstractionist’, since to do otherwise would be to ‘deny the power of his imagery’. Morgan then claims that, because looking for ‘buried narrative is futile’, ‘the rightness of… these works resembles that of a nursery rhyme’. (‘Ken Kiff at Nicola Jacobs’, Artforum April 1980, p. 86).

It is hard to know from his observations whether Morgan does in fact sees Kiff as a sophisticated painter whose work is undercut by a child-like imagery or whether he views Kiff’s work as offering something more positive. After all, a good proportion of nursery rhymes began life either as more or less coded political satires or as “Mother Goose Songs” or “Old Wives’ Tales”; that is as indicative of the traditional understanding of vernacular folklore. All in all, it seems that at best Morgan’s attitude towards Kiff’s work is both itself convoluted and highly coded, suggestive of a critic more anxious to protect his own sense of sophistication than to honestly engage with work that challenges it. Although, in the last analysis the review is possibly less dismissive on a careful re-reading than might initially appear, it remains indicative of the critical reluctance to engage with Kiff on his own terms rather than those of the “advanced abstraction” dominant at the time.

Ken Kiff Dog in the street (Sequence 63)

What I suggest Morgan fails to engae with can be indicated by a brief discussion of Dog in a street (S. 63), a work easily presumed as visualising a scene from a nursery rhyme or children’s story. At first sight the image appears mundane enough – “dog discomforted by over-friendly man”. Kiff’s subtle stylistic shifts clearly question the conventional expectations about the relationship between dog and man. The three-dimensionality of the cringing figure of the large dog, emphasised by black outline drawing, contrasts with the less emphatic figure of the man who appears all of a piece with the wall behind him (and, by implication, with his surroundings more generally). The resulting sense of tension between isolation and belonging puts in question the emotional expectations conventionally attached to encounters between a large dog and a man. The painting suggests what might be called a “dog’s eye view”, one in which, faced with the man’s gesture, the dog is perhaps uncertain as to whether it is being greeted or threatened. This focus on the emotional state of uncertainty of a non-human being is, I suggest, a significant aspect of the quiet radicalism of Ken’s work, its challenge to conventional expectations. If, as an image, its’ ‘rightness … resembles that of a nursery rhyme’, then it is surely a nursery rhyme that offers a highly unusual and empathetic view of the lives of non-human beings.   

My second example is a claim by the abstract painter John Hoyland, who fully identified with the ideology of Modernist painting. Hoyland dismissed Kiff as turning his back on ‘all the understanding of what’s gone on in modern art’ and, as a result, ending up doing ‘some idiosyncratic little kind of painting’, ‘an escape’ said to result in the artist painting his own ‘nightmares’. (A rather extraordinary characterisation of Kiff’s work, given the sense of joy and wonder articulated by much of it). Hoyland’s assumptions about the “progressive” nature of modern art are part-and-parcel of High Modernity’s professionalised alienation from any connection with, or attempt to inform, 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 Cubism and Surrealism 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 turnover of new styles to supply a market increasingly aligned to the cultural values of ‘haute-couture’. To Hoyland, wholly identified with the Modernist belief in a “progressive” abstraction, Kiff’s work could only appear isolated and regressive. That work appears very differently, however, if we accept to see it in Kiff’s terms; namely as the articulation of an expanded, and inclusive, visual poetics concerned to maintain connections with, or attempt to inform, common life.

Ken Kiff Posting a letter

Extracts from a conversation between Marega Palser and Iain Biggs.

IB. I hadn’t realized that you’d got that connection with Clifford McLucas. That’s fascinating.

MP. I’ve said it quite a few times over the last few years when people say: ‘Oh, who are your influences’? Cliff will really be there. And it’s funny because it was for such a short amount of time in the grand scheme of things and given the amount of time I’ve worked with other people that have been really quite key in my life. But it really did something, you know, that moment in time, just a switch to where you’re thinking about the body in space.

IB. That makes absolute sense to me. I often think with things that influence us it’s not about the length of time, it’s about an intensity or relationship that’s a catalyst. What kind of response, or what kinds of conversations, did you have around the phone box once you converted it into this map, shrine, information booth, whatever you want to call it?

Viewing the Climate Lab phone box installation.

MP. Well, I just sat quite outside of it, sort of woman-ed or man-ed it you know, just to make sure that no one was going to trash it. I wanted it to be safe for the purposes of Climate Lab. With other stuff I just go: ‘OK, what happens when you put something on the street happens’. A lot of the time, it’s fine. It’s the Council you’ve got to look out for, they want to clean everything up. So I stayed very outside of it. And then sometimes people would come and sit with me. Quite a lot of them seemed very … a bit like you just had a meditation. A lot of them said they felt very calm afterwards and so it was quite a profound effect because they’re still hearing the high street because all their focus is leaning in. It was a moment just to sit and be somewhere else. And I guess what happens as well, when you’re in that zone where your breathing starts calming down, getting slower. I think that’s probably why there’s this feeling of a kind of serenity, and I think people felt very moved by it. One of the key things is the image of a foetus of a baby in that it’s very strong, everyone can relate to it, whatever they’re bringing to that image. And I guess it’s a symbol of something that’s new, a new life, it’s hopeful.

Viewer in the Climate Lab phone box installation.

Detail from the Climate Lab phone box installation.

It’s really a way in for people, because they can relate to it directly. And then all the other images might at first look random, but because the baby’s got images in it, and you see the whole network of the body working, and that’s a sort of animal, there’s a horse head in the heart, and the baby’s got like a frog in it. But they’re making these connections further into nature.

IB. This reminds me of when I had acupuncture. My acupuncturist had an amazing image on her wall of a body that was also a landscape with all sorts of different elements in different places, a picture map of acupuncture points. And I’ve suddenly got to a vision of the telephone box as having a similar kind of feel.

MP. Yes, very much. Because I think what I really wanted to try and convey – and it feels like it’s still a work in progress – is the idea that we’re 70% water, we have the water elements, we have minerals in us, we have so much electricity, it’s incredible, you know… So there’s all this stuff that makes you, and this isn’t even our memory and our emotional memory, or our traumas or whatever. This is the fundamental makeup of the body. But because we can’t see half of it, it’s very hard to know that it’s there. So it’s really wanting to address this connectivity, to relate these things in nature to the elements, constellations. Everything is connected, it’s out there and it’s really fascinating. I watched a little documentary about Zen Buddhism last night and it had this lovely image of a tree. And it’s not a tree, we name it a tree, but actually, for the tree to exist, it needs everything. It needs the Earth, it needs this, it needs that. So everything is in everything. If we think of our bodies we’re the same as the tree.

IB. How did the scientists in climate lab respond to this? Particularly, I guess, to the phone box?

MP. Oh, I think a lot of them were like: ‘OH’!

I was concerned that it should be playful but also empowering. It’s about taking power really and doing something, taking a step into a public space that doesn’t normally happen, going there. I remember what one of the cofounders of the Incredible Edible Network [https://www.incredibleedible.org.uk/] said about asking permission to do things, ‘Just do it. Apologize later’. And I’ve always been the same. The response to the phone box has been really, really lovely, you know – there’s a word, ‘lovely’! – but positive.

What I thought you were going to ask me was: ‘how did the scientists respond to the whole process’? And on the whole the response was really good. Sometimes resistant. You could see people thinking like: ‘Why the fuck are we doing this’? ‘What was the point’? ‘Oh, my God, no, that’s hippie-dippie shit’, you know? But then people saw where it led to and it suddenly turned into something else and transformed those feelings. I guess any feelings we have of resistance, it’s just us being scared a bit, fear. Or coming in with a preconceived idea of something. I think sometimes when you just let yourself be open something changes. A lot of the responses, as well as being about really wanting to take in the body, the somatic elements, related to when people are working, not just for themselves, but in their teaching with students as well. Which is good, I think, really good.

IB. Thanks. Is there anything you want to say that I hadn’t asked you about ?

MP.  I guess I’m just thinking of the deep mapping now. It’s a never-ending process, isn’t it? Every day just keeps throws up something different with what’s going on in the wider world. What goes on directly around us and how it’s affecting us, how it’s affecting people. I think what I really noticed doing Climate Lab is how – coming back to place and space and how that affects us – is the environments and the institutions that people are working in. How they are affected by those places and spaces because of the demands on them and the amount of stress they’re all under.

What really hit me during the first Climate Lab was all these people working in various departments of Swansea university, which is quite vast now, and most of them hadn’t met. Or if they had they didn’t know each other, they weren’t really seeing each other “in the flesh” because of how they’re working. And so their connecting felt very, very powerful. I think they felt very empowered and also, a bit: ‘So I’m not on my own with all these thoughts and feelings’. Because what arose was how many of them expressed how they weren’t able to say how they felt. The opportunities just weren’t there. So you’re working in that world, then you’re going home and you can’t talk about it in a social way because people are going: ‘oh, no, you’re not going to talk about that, are you’! So it’s the amount of emotion being held in that people are living with. I could see that. The climate issue is what it is, you know, and none of us individually can go: ‘If I do this, blah, blah ….’ But what we can do is acknowledge how we’re being affected, how we’re being affected by our immediate environment, and what can we do within that. Starting with the body and things very close up to us, because if that’s not right, there’s no way you’re going to be able to do anything else….

Because I’ve worked with some of those people before in various contexts, I was very aware of how on edge they are in all sorts of ways in relation to the institution. They have to play the institutional game. They’ve got to put in grant applications, they’ve got to write papers, and so on and so forth, and the gap between those institutional expectations and where they are in their internal world, just seems to be under enormous tension.

IB. I could tellhow importantClimate Lab was for some of the academics at Swansea I know. So, congratulations. I notice that one respondent said:

No one talks about climate or ecology crises in my department – not in work time, not at work meetings. Let alone their feelings. It’s an extraordinary taboo. I am always thinking about it, yet never feel ‘allowed’ to mention it.

MP. Well it was a shared responsibility that the whole thing came about. Me and Fern were one part, but it took a lot from other people to make it happen. Some of them are deeply sensitive and throughout the whole thing I thought back to those people. I just wanted to say: ‘Alright, you know that it’s not alright. But it’s alright as well to really acknowledge that feeling that it’s not alright. OK, now what little things can we do’?

IB. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because in a way that’s a kind of mutual mapping of the emotional situation and an acknowledging of it, and that somehow makes it possible to keep going.

MP. Yes. And the feeling of being heard. What came up a lot was people saying: ‘I feel like I’ve been heard’. I think that’s deeply emotional for people. Lots of people really cried when it came to talking and being witnessed, because I guess it was the first time. It’s a bit like keeping everything in, still keeping everything in, and then the balloon bursts. … I think that was especially interesting for me because over the last couple of years I’ve been doing work in Park Prison as well. It was very interesting to be working in a really fucking hard environment, with prisoners on the wing, when just going into the prison environment is so inhuman. It’s all just straight lines and there’s no room for ‘being heard’ at all. So to be able to start creating that within a very hard environment has been interesting, and then doing Climate Lab. I can see some similarities in environments there!

IB. Thank you very much.

M P with the Climate Lab phone box

Extracts from a conversation between Marega Palser and Iain Biggs.

Background and context

Marega Palser and I first met in 2017. We walked round her home town of Newport and talked about the possibilities that deep mapping might offer someone like herself: trained as a dancer, then at art school, and at that time working with movement, drawing and performance. (She has since also trained as a yoga teacher). We met again later during her project Framing the Transient NoW (An exercise in deep mapping), part of a residency she had in Swansea. In 2023 I found myself attending Climate Lab, an unusual collaboration between scientists, engineers and artists that began at Swansea University in 2022, via Zoom.I particularly wanted to talk to her about the way she sees the influence of deep mapping on her work with Climate Lab because her background and ways of working. Her performance work “on the street” seemed to me to place her differently in relation to deep mapping from the points of departure represented elsewhere in this section of the PLaCE International web site. 

Marega co-designed and co-hosted Climate Lab withFern Smith [https://fernsmith.uk/],  co-founder of Volcano Theatre and initiator of Emergence, a forum for dialogue and collaborative practice in support of a life-sustaining future. (For Fern’s account of Climate Lab see the Emergence web site – https://emergenceuk.blogspot.com/). Fern sees Climate Lab as ‘an experiment in the power of connection, creativity, and spontaneity’ and designed to take ‘the expert viewpoint of climate researchers out of the box of the scientific method’ by ‘creating a space for those on the front-line of climate research to connect to the emotions they have about the climate data they are collecting or working alongside’.

Climate Lab came about due to an exchange between a 12-year-old Japanese schoolboy and Professor Tavi Murray, a highly respected Glaciologist and Antarctic Researcher base at Swansea University who he interviewed as part of a school project. At the end of the interview he asked her a question that, as a professional environmental scientist working in academia, she’d never been asked before. “How does it makes you feel seeing the changes you’ve seen?” Over time she tried to answer that question and inviting other climate scientists to do the same. Climate Lab grewout of theirconcerns in relation to that emotionally difficult question. Drawing on their various skills, Marega and Fern facilitating processes that enabled Climate Lab participants to witness emotions, create art, and imagine the future.

N.B. All the images used here are copyright Marega Palser and are used with her permission.

Introduction

What follows here is edited extracts from a long, fascinating, interview-come-conversation with Marega. As her observations will make very clear, Climate Lab has lessons for us all. However, the length of our conversation, which sometimes rambled, required some editing and I have occasionally changed the order of sentences for greater clarity. I’ve also chosen sections that focus on those aspects of Climate Lab likely to be of particular interest to readers, whether institutionally employed or otherwise, concerned with the many ‘faces’ of deep mapping. I hope in doing this I’ve not lost the gist and spirit of what Marega told me.  

Iain Biggs (IB) First of all, many thanks for agreeing to talk to me. Can you start us off by telling me how you came to be involved with Climate Lab and what was your role in it? 

Marega Palser (MP) A call went out to work with scientists to do with emotions. Working with data that just doesn’t seem to be penetrating is emotionally so overwhelming for them. Fern got in touch and said, ‘look, this call-out’s happening, would you be interested in collaborating on it’? In a pilot Climate Lab they’d focused on the sea level rise and, coincidentally and at the same time, I’d seen this map of the coast of Britain with all these red areas saying ‘just go and look, this is all the land that’s going to go’. So we needed to explore how we could work through their situation in a creative way, tapping into those emotions.

We’d known each other since 1988 and every now and then we’ve done bits of work together, but never on this sort of project. Anyway, we said: ‘yes, let’s rise to the challenge’ even though it was very scary. You’re working with people that inhabit this totally different field and suddenly you’re finding reasons to justify why you’re going to use this process with scientists, coming in with a different way of working, a different language. We spent a week together throwing loads of ideas into the mix. Fern is one of the most qualified people I can think of for these kinds of workshops because she’s done lots of counselling work over the years, but we were also thinking about how to get people out of their heads and into the body to find different ways of looking at things. Fern put a proposal in and it got accepted. Oh, and part of that was to work with two other artists so there’d be an artist’s response to all the information that came up….

IB. You made two really quite distinct types of work for Climate Lab. First there is Seeing and Feeling, put together by Steve Jones and yourself and based on words and responses from the participants.Then later you made the phone box installation. Can you say a little about the thinking behind both pieces? How they were put together and why you chose to take the approaches you did?

MP. The first Climate Lab was in three parts, with the first part about doing lots of exercises and listening to the scientists. The response I made to that was a performative piece. You saw how people responded to what’s said. Then it was as if the work wanted to develop or grow into something else that can be a final piece. So I made Seeing and Feeling for the third part of that Climate Lab because it just felt like: ‘well, I can’t do a performance for it but it could be filmed’. It was very much based on performance, on a total response to everything I heard and witnessed from the first Climate Lab.

IB. Your phone box installation draws on your experience of deep mapping. What was involved in putting it together and why did you take the approach that you did?

The Climate Lab phone box installation.

MP. I’ve got to break that down a bit first. Tavi, who’d initiated the project, was bowled over by the first event and got funding to open up Climate Lab internationally. We knew that we had to do that on Zoom, so Fern and me spent lots of time working on it and rehearsing to make it even more succinct because the international event had to be in two parts because of Zoom and time zones.

I was working as a co-facilitator and as an artist, so I made two different art responses to each of those workshops. Then what I did was to take everything from the workshops into the phone box. So earlier I’d looked at shrines and what it is to make a shrine, but also at the idea of a baby and the internal network and patterns that are formed internally and in the exterior world.

Detail from the Climate Lab phone box installation.

Detail from the Climate Lab phone box installation.

As you know, I like doing stuff on the high street and I’ve done lots of what some people might call gorilla art. I don’t know what you’d call it. But I think over time, especially when lock-down happened, me and Steve just used the high street as a gallery. You know, we’d drag things around, take a vacuum cleaner for a walk and install it somewhere. I want to say ‘stupid shit’, but I think what I love about it is the conversations that arise from doing it. And during lock-down, a lot of the people were out there, living on the streets or maybe just doing their shopping in a supermarket. So there’s always this question: ‘who is your audience? Who is this for”? And I always think: ‘well, anyone that’s curious’. On the high street you will get every age, every colour, every background, every social status. It’s there for anyone who’s curious….

IB That reminds me very much of the way that you worked in Swansea on the Framing the Transient NoW project.

MP I think doing that project really taught me a lot because it was the first time I’d really worked in that way. I’d done other stuff on the streets as the Clarks, but Swansea went deeper…. Our conversations really helped me ground it in something else; not just conversations, not just about art, but looking at something wider in society. Anyway using the phone box was a way for Climate Lab to take a message out, to say: ‘look, this is what’s happening’. It takes that message out of an academic situation or as a Zoom thing and puts it very directly on the high street. So it’s broadening the underlying message without saying: ‘This is what it is’. I think people started seeing these connections for themselves.

Detail from the Climate Lab phone box installation.

The reason I chose the phone box is that I’d done another one. I’d had to move three times this year. So I have all this stuff, and art pictures, and postcards I’ve collected for years and years. And I thought, Oh, God, you know, part of me just wants to burn them all. And then I thought no, what can I do creatively with them. There was this meggie old phone box outside The Place in Newport, which is a community space. So I thought, right, I’m just going to start pasting all these postcards up in there. And it looked amazing. And there was another phone box the other side of it so I just covered the two of them in these images which stayed up for ages and ages. They were going to be part of an event in Newport but about two weeks before it started BT took them away!

As a result of that, I thought of using the phone box as a gallery for Climate Lab. I love the idea of a BT phone box as places where communication was key. I remember leaving home at 16 and I was in London and I’d phoned home every week on a Sunday, you know, in the phone box: ‘Can I reverse the charge”? So, coming back to Climate Lab, I thought it’s a lovely symbol, really, that it’s about communicating something going on.

IB. When you introduced the phone box installation at the two Climate Lab sessions I attended, you mentioned deep mapping as an influence on how you worked. Can you say something about that influence, because what’s always fascinated me is that you come from a place that is actually much more about the body and performance. And although performance was what deep mapping in Wales was about early on, a lot of it has moved away from that. You somehow seem to move between those two approaches.

MP. The mapping really came out through dance. I started combining my love of making art and dance, because for years I thought: ‘how can I merge these two things’? They always felt quite different. Being at art college as a mature student doing my final project just birthed this idea: ‘I’ll just manage to find a way of doing drawing, printmaking and performance’. And then out of that grew a show called Sometimes We Look, which was all about drawing and dance, responding to choreography. I’d be going through some notebooks thinking: ‘oh, there’s my stick figures of that dance, how does it go’? And then you’re trying to ape these stick figures, and then another dance comes out of it. So it’s a feedback thing and out of that questions. ‘Why do I do certain moves’? ‘What is it in my body that goes to do certain positions’? You know, they’re not taught positions, they’re just felt. So I started thinking of the body as a map where things are held, and about the story behind that mapping of the body. So it goes into a whole emotional, somatic, mapping.

Then there was the idea of how spaces affect us because I always like working with space. And it was Clifford Lucas who really introduced me to that again, back in the late 80s when he was with Brith Gof. We did a small project with them, Dance Wales and Brith Gof. And I always remember Clifford said: ‘Why does a dancer start in the middle of the stage’? You know? And so he just really flipped my head about working with space. I love architecture anyway, and places and spaces; some people might call it psychoactive space. So how does the space trigger something in the body and the body respond to a place and memory? That is really my way into deep mapping. It hasn’t just happened instantly, its grown over time. And then before doing the Swansea project I saw this term ‘deep mapping’, which is how I met you. I read your article, where you quote from Clifford.

So it’s been a long, winding, way to deep mapping and the Climate Lab. But I think what I really love about it and the Swansea project is that it’s a form of documenting something in its present moment and looking at the past and future. It felt really relevant to Climate Lab. It’s such a natural process for me to ask: ‘What is happening here, not just in this little bit, but as a whole; what is happening in this time-frame with these people’? So it was a way of collecting their responses, all this information coming in, and then going away and laying it all out. That’s where the … What’s the word? Not just curation. But finding a way of going: ‘how can I best respond to this and give it back.’

[N.B All images reproduced in this and subsequent sections are copyright and reproduced courtesy 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].

Ken Kiff The poet Mayakovsky invites the sun to tea

Questions of category

Just why Kiff’s work is hard to categorise can be illustrated by looking at Timothy Hyman’s Beyond the Formalist Canon: Visionaries, Dreamers, Outsiders, Chapter Four of his book The World Made New: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century (Thames and Hudson 2016). In it Kiff is grouped with Ensor, Kubin, Rabindranath Tagore, Jack Yeats, Henry Darger, and Jacob Lawrence. Artists Hyman sees as modern symbolists who challenge ‘exclusive orthodoxies, whether academic or formalist’. I suspect this says more about Hyman’s idiosyncratic view of twentieth century figurative painting than about Kiff’s work, given possible comparisons with the work of the American artsit Romare Bearden or the Indian artist Arpita Singh; that is to the work of practitioners of various forms of expanded and inclusive “realisms” that marry the possibilities of early modern Western painting with older cultural traditions. An approach that Kiff would summarise as a ‘flexible realism’ that interacts with ‘the life inside one and outside’, so that ‘more of reality can be rediscovered, reclaimed, brought into a new wholeness’. (A view Hyman refers to, but then simply ignores). Rather than locate Kiff’s work in relation to dialogues between the different arts and the cross-cultural concerns that run through a significant proportion of twentieth century figurative painting, Hyman choses to include Kiff in a chapter dealing with “visionaries”, “dreamers”, “symbolists”, and “outsiders”, without ever making clear to which he sees Kiff as belonging. None the less, despite this Hyman’s categories, if suitably qualified, can serve to indicate something of Kiff’s orientation and concerns.

Kiff might be called a “dreamer”, for example, in the specific sense used by the Archetypal psychologist and writer James Hillman, who notes: ‘… it is in the dream that the dreamer himself performs as one image among others and where it can legitimately be shown that the dreamer is in the image rather than the image in the dreamer’. (Archetypal Psychology Putnam, Conn., Spring Publications, Inc. 2004, p.18). Hillman’s observation would suggest we might identify Kiff as both maker of, and frequent participant in, his own images, an observation seemingly confirmed by the work itself. However, if they are a form of conscious dreaming-through-painting, they also reflect his careful attention to ‘other voices of thought’, since they become an intrapsychic conversation that includes elements from history, culture, religion and nature. Kiff is certainly no solitary fantasist.

But is he a “visionary”? Cecil Collins, perhaps the best known twentieth-century English visionary painter, aligned himself with the spiritual concerns of the poet Kathleen Raine, whose work he sometimes illustrated. Spiritual concerns that are, in my view, pretty much the antithesis of Kiff’s down-to earth psychic inclusivity. If Kiff is a visionary, then it’s of a very different kind to Collins. Following James Hillman again, we might link Kiff’s dreaming-through-painting to: ‘“soul-making”, taking the phrase from the poets William Blake and, particularly, John Keats: ‘Call the world if you please, “The vale of soul-making”. Then you will find out the use of the world’. (Ibid. p. 38). Kiff’s vision then, unlike that of Collins’, is very much this-worldly, terrestrial, grounded in an expanded sense of dailiness, of the everyday. That expanded sense is, then, the basis of his radicalism and of the alternative, “pagan”, and inclusive notion of a shared modernity championed by a poet such as John Burnside.

Is Kiff in any sense an “outsider”? As a Royal Academician, an Associate Artist at the National Gallery, and someone who showed work in major galleries internationally, this hardly seems an appropriate categorisation. However, in one particular sense it points to an aspect of Kiff’s position if we take up Lynne Cooke’s suggestion that we substitute the term “outlier” for “outsider”. This, she believes, properly acknowledges that some artists gain ‘recognition by means at variance with expected channels and protocols’. (Lynne Cooke Boundary Trouble: Navigating Margin and Mainstream in Lynne Cooke (ed.) Outliers and American Vanguard Art Chicago, University of Chicago Press 2018, p. 4.) In Cooke’s very specific sense Kiff could reasonably be seen as an “outlier”, since his work gained recognition largely despite being seen by many in the art world as at variance with the dominant late Modernist theories of painting at the time of his emergence into art world consciousness.

To sum up, Kiff could possibly be categorised as a visionary, a dreamer, and an outlier, but only along the highly specific lines indicated above. All of which discussion I see as ultimately pointing to the fact that his radicalism lies in his rejection of a Modernist culture underwritten by possessive individualism; a culture predicated on the exclusivity built into the notion of a monolithic “heroic” ego and on the Cartesian splitting off of notions of self from other, of body from mind, of the imaginal from the perceptual, of the spiritual from the material, and of the so-called “inner” from the so called “outer”. By contrast, I see Kiff as embracing a plural and relational notion of self, one that requires our awareness of multiplicity at all levels.      

Some background

Ken Kiff was born in Dagenham in 1935. His father’s death at the beginning of the war resulted in family difficulties that, along with the consequences of nocturnal nervous attacks, complicated his childhood. Despite this he did well at school, studied at Hornsey School of Art, married, raised a family and, in time, won an international reputation for his work. Sadly Kiff died in 2001, aged only sixty-five. His work was then largely ignored by the art world at large until 2018, when the major exhibition Ken Kiff, The Sequence again attracted attention to its visual complexity, its variety, richness and extended emotional reach. Subsequent smaller shows suggest a growing interest in his work.

I first wrote about Kiff’s work in 1983 and subsequently, working closely with him, organised and edited the book Ken Kiff’s Sequence, published in 1998. It was clear to me then that his images were as unusual in the orientation of the mentality behind them as they were compelling, but it has taken me a further quarter-century to fully grasp their quiet but fundamental radicalism. While neither “politically” nor “socially” engaged in the sense these terms are usually deployed, I believe Kiff’s images none-the-less speak to some of the most pressing issues of our time.

Ken Kiff’s radicalism

The artist Jeremy Deller has argued that any good artist is ‘socially engaged’, presumably on the basis that he or she cannot but be critically engaged with a shared culture. It’s in this context that we might understand the art historian and critic Norbert Lynton acknowledgement that Ken Kiff’s historical and aesthetic understanding was much subtler than his own and those who shared his professions. It was this that enabled Kiff to see that early modern painting offered a radically new form of material thinking, the implications of which Chagall had grasped before any of his contemporaries. (A thinking that would be increasingly marginalised or ignored after c.1955). Kiff in turn recognised the importance of Chagall’s balancing of an old and more or less universal language predicated on figurative imagery against the socially distancing effect of Cubism’s formal radicalism. This balancing served as the basis of his own particular form of radical social engagement An insight that allowed him to take up Chagall’s distinction between Cubism’s concern with ‘a surface covered with forms in a certain order’ and: ‘a surface covered with representations of things (objects, animals, human beings) in a certain order in which logic and illustration have no importance. The visual effect of the composition is what is paramount. (Quoted in Norbert Lynton ‘Chagall “over the Roofs of the World”’ in Susan Compton (ed). Chagall London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1985: pp. 20-21). The result is images with a plurality of connections, attachments and relationships that resonate both with our multiple senses of self, yet maintain clear connections with the mundane and every-day.

Ken Kiff Woman in sky.

Kiff rejected Modernist critics’ promotion of the idea of the separateness and exclusivity of each of the arts in their “advanced” forms in favour of an inclusive approach to the making of images. Reading Yves Bonnefoy’s poetry and art writing helped shape his work, as did his friendship with Martha Kapos – a poet, art historian and a colleague at Chelsea School of Art. I will draw on both writers here. However, I will also draw on the Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, whose work Kiff almost certainly did not known. If this requires some justification, it must be that many of the folk tales in Michael Foss’ Folk Tales of the British Isles, for which Kiff made images, are Irish, and so are part of Ní Dhomhnaill’s own heritage. My reasoning, however, is less literal. They share a poetic orientation, a shared concern with an saol eile. This becomes apparent if you view Kiff’s Woman and Sky (1999) in the light of John Montague’s translation of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem Cailleach (Hag). Doing so alerted me to the fact that, despite their very real differences, they share a broadly Jungian view of folklore and an interest in the Feminine, particularly the transformative image of the spéirbhean (literally ‘sky woman’, but more usually ‘woman of great beauty or goddess’). This figure is the topic of poems by Ní Dhomhnaill such as Primavera and of her prose essay Mis and Dubh Ruis: A Parable of Psychic Transformation. The spéirbhean is, I suggest, as good a name as any for the numinous female figure present in a great many of Kiff’s paintings, drawings and prints.

I also see “linguistic” parallels. Ní Dhomhnaill is concerned to revivify the poetic possibilities of the Irish language in the face of the ubiquity of English in post-colonial Ireland. Kiff wanted to revivify painting by returning to the radical “linguistic” possibilities inherent in early modern painting at a time when these were increasing seen as passé. The animating impulse is, for both artists, ultimately psychosocial; a desire to use the psychic resources revealed by immersion in their chosen “language” so as to help us achieve a degree of detachment from our unconscious activity and, rather than repress it, help incorporate it into our lives. In this context their attention to folklore, understood as a very old way of thinking that helps link past and present, provides the testimonial aspect necessary to any empathetic imagination. In Kiff’s work this testimonial imagination, possibly fed by Picasso’s reinterpretation of major paintings in the Western canon in his later work, enabled Kiff to refigure iconography from Western and other traditions from the viewpoint of an ensemble sense of self. A viewpoint initially animated by synergies between insights obtained during sessions with a psychoanalyst and his experience of painting and taken up in the explorations of The Sequence. A viewpoint further confirmed and deepened by his reading of, and making images to accompany, British and Irish folk tales.

An aside: heads resting sideways…

Ken Kiff Desolation (Sequence 101)

Thinking about Kiff’s paintings in the context of Ní Dhomhnaill’s work may also provide an insight into an otherwise enigmatic aspect of his imagery. When he was asked about the ‘heads resting sideways’ in many of his paintings and prints by Martha Kapos, he replied that: ‘… the “music” of the painting has kind of firmed up at that point into that particular key, or concentration of themes; that each colour, form, edge or whatever will be speaking, and at that point the speaking is coming right up into the concentrated form of a head’. A response that is explicit, but only at the level of the process of composition. It does not help the viewer who wonders how such “heads” serve as one element among others in Kiff’s figuration. Ní Dhomhnaill’s discussion of dinnsheanchas (loosely “place lore”) however, suggests another way in which we might understand the poetics of these heads without diminishing Kiff’s focus on their ‘concentration of themes’.

Dinnsheanchas, as a way of knowing, bypasses distinctions between nature and culture in order to facilitate an intimate and reciprocal relationship between place and community. Thus Ní Dhomhnaill refers to a relative who, when mentioning a local landmark, almost invariably tells her that it is the petrified body of a giant. This focusing of the qualities of place through personification parallels Kiff’s sense of the music of a painting that becomes a focused “speaking”, one that then takes the concentrated form of a head. Such a head might be said to personify dinnsheanchas; not literally in the sense of a specific body of local knowledge, but as signifying the sense of intense reciprocity between humans and the landscapes that ground them that such knowledge enacts. This same sense of focused “placed-ness” can also be linked to Bonefoy’s notion of ‘true place’ as that which appears in moments of epiphany and oneness. (See John T. Naughton The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy Chicago, University of Chicago Press 1984, p.79).

(The references to the work of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and to Yves Bonnefoy above and throughout this essay refer to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill Collected Essays Dublin, New Island, 2005 and to John T. Naughton The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984).

Listening at the confluence

…there is “a fundamental unity to everything related to the making of images”.

                        John T. Norton quoting Yves Bonnefoy

Ken Kiff Talking with a psycho-analyst: night sky (Sequence 113)

In Kiff’s painting Talking with a psycho-analyst: night sky (S. 113), two seated figures face each other across a space where two worlds meet. On the left a daylight world cluttered with tools and a cast of strange persona; on the right a twilight world attuned to the shrouded figure of the psychoanalyst. Against the implication of the title, the analyst’s stance suggests that it is he who is speaking, while the figure on the blue chair and those around him listen. The overall suggestion is of a conversational give-and-take that might stand for the orientation of The Sequence as a whole. Kiff’s concern with a “musical thinking’ is closely related to that of Yves Bonnefoy, who quotes St. Bernard’s aphorism: ‘If you want to see, listen’. The poet and polymath Erin Kavanagh notes that: ‘The process of drawing is a close study in attention. The process of writing poetry, a close study in listening’. She adds:

‘In paying close attention, making oneself become still, there arises a connection between the artist and subject, a flow. It’s an intangible encounter that the artist then dresses with skill and humility. Such as where Shakespeare holds the essence consistently in mind, then plays with accidentals to confer meaning….This experience is commonly described most with music. That feeling where one is being played by the music and not the other way around. The foremind can separate off and, for brief bursts, observe itself locked in a dance, a copulation. The result being creation’. (Email communication with the author, 06.09.2019 in response to a request to clarify points made in the abstract for an unpublished paper ‘Spirituality and Culture: Portraits’).  

These linkages relate directly to the value Kiff placed on poetry, notably that of Rilke, Yeats, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost and Vladimir Mayakovsky, the last the subject of two of Kiff’s paintings. Kiff particularly valued the poets Wallace Stevens, Yves Bonnefoy and Martha Kapos, who supported his view that the work of the poet and the painter is essentially the same. I reference poets, then, to indicate significant, and often neglected, aspects of Kiff’s work.

While Kiff’s work can be seen as aligned with innovative concepts in contemporary thought, it remains important to stress its poetic qualities, its musicality and psychic openness. This, in turn, requires us to be clear about his relationship to psychoanalysis. Kiff visited psychoanalysts to discuss aspects of his work and to address his often acute anxiety. He read Marie-Louise von Franz on folk tales and Freud’s The Question of Lay Analysis. We know he was prompted to start The Sequence because of things he’d discovered to exist through psychoanalysis also surfaced in pictorial images and dynamics. None-the-less, John Elderfield’s framing of Kiff’s work as ‘the charting of an obviously modern voyage of discovery into the primal interior of the imagination’ (quoted in Andrew Lambirth Ken Kiff London, Thames & Hudson, 2001, p. 98) is potentially misleading. Kiff worked with a “language” of imagery far older and more diverse than that of modern psychology and, when discussing his work, studiously avoided any suggestion of the “heroic discovery” that underpins the colonialist history of modern cartography (‘charting’) as part of what Ursula K. Le Guin calls ‘The Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero’. His painting and print-making is related to ‘dream-work’ in Bonnefoy’s sense, where the dream is a collective event shared by a multitude of persons/persona, but where dreaming and image-making remain distinct acts. It is perhaps more helpful to understand that, through the physical act of making images in all their visual musicality, Kiff imaginatively evokes the flowing-together of everyday life and that “other life”; one that, as Ní Dhomhnaill says, even the dogs in the streets of West Kerry know exists, and where a constant moving in and out of those two worlds is understood as entirely natural. Kiff worked precisely by attending to this constant flowing together of different worlds emerging through the making of an image, often over long periods of time. (Attending to a flowing together that, we should remind ourselves, has been considered entirely normal in most cultures and at most times by those concerned to gain a deeper understanding of the world). That attention enabled the emergence of Kiff’s works to evoke, not some ego-focused process of “heroic” personal discovery, but rather as an activity closer to that of a midwife, as a process of patiently accompanying the birth of an image over time.

Ken Kiff Sun, tree and lightning (pastel)