I have been looking forward to this exhibition by the artist Carrie Stanley for a long time. It is a special show for several reasons of which I will explain further . I saved myself a good hour or more to look at the paintings and absorb them and have since returned a few times. It was a beautiful sunny day when I first entered the small, intimate space after an awful few months of endless rain. The sunlight shining directly on a large yet seemingly intimate painting “Night Swimming” the heavenly light shining upon beautiful cadmium yellow with shadowy figures, suggestive of a memory of something imagined. Like a dream, I found it an almost spiritual experience upon entering the space. I have since found out how important the experience and how integral Colour is to Carrie’s work.
I have known about Carrie’s work as an artist for a long time. I knew and was fond of her late husband Mike and I have connected with her work through her instagram pages and in particular her “Visual Grief Diaries” which document her feelings and makes eloquent visual documentation on the process around her and her own family’s grief. For this Carrie Stanley makes evocative searching drawings and paintings and sometimes performative actions which embody and reflect the process of memory and of grief. It is profoundly moving and extraordinarily brave work, which often stops me in my tracks and I believe is in itself groundbreaking, and inspiring for helping others in coping ; especially with the aftermath of and coping with loved ones lost.
The untangling and constant unravelling of feelings associated with loss is of course integral to, and forms the basis of this show, and is I believe (though not the only) , a very special element of the fascinating and unique paintings that have emerged and evolved in the years since and are now flowing into Carrie’s ongoing work.
The most immediate thing I notice as an artist and painter myself is the attention to and interaction with material, and also a lovely sense of the joy of the painting process itself , and the immediacy of it all. The paintings all have a sense of layering, each gesture opening up another layer or memory.
Recently In a talk I conducted with the choreographer Siobhan Davies (as part of a Symposium at the University of Oxford on the theme of “Gesture”) Davies spoke to me about the way that a simple gesture in painting and dance can reveal, hold and open up so much in terms of memory. The choreographer is interested in and is working on archives, and Carrie Stanley’s paintings seems to embody this notion, and hold so much within. This idea which resonates with my own interests, of the painting being a whole body experience is something contained in the work and inspires Carrie, especially the work of the Choreographer Martha Graham who eloquently expressed emotion through basic human movement. This is explored in artists I myself admire and are influenced by such as Carolee Schneemann and Florence Peake,the Vienna Actionists , the Gutai movement, Yoko Ono . Where painting and the body are almost synonymous. The sensory experience and presence of the body is somehow tangible in Carrie Stanley’s paintings.
Archival material also forms a big part of Carrie’s process, the paintings making use of and work directly from an archive of her husband Mike’s negatives for photographs of which she has a big collection of (Mike Stanley was himself trained as, and was a talented artist himself which made him such an uniquely important director).
The way Carrie works with the negatives though, gives the paintings a touching palpable and loving feeling that there is another presence being revealed and sometimes hidden making the works feel simultaneously personal , poignant and powerful . I recently went to a show of the Chinese artist Xie Nanxing in London which some of Carrie’s work brought to my mind. The clever layering, and sense of something being erased , revealed and erased again. It creates an enigmatic mystery to each piece.
The colour and materiality of the work on display here is both extraordinary and striking. In all the paintings there are elements of the surface coming to the fore, with staining and pouring with tentative gestural markings, and a constant awareness of the the canvas itself. There is a great sense that the whole process is gently being revealed.
The painting ‘ Mistress of Crewell’ I had go up to several times as I thought it had a 3D effect and perhaps used gauzes. The startling illusory effect on the eye created by the way the canvas had been unusually stretched behind, almost appearing like embroidery emphasising the raw canvas and the layering of different tecniques. Apparently, the mesh around the edges of the canvas were triggered by a childhood memory of feeling the edges of an embroidered cloth. It is an extraordinary tactile and unique piece. Each of the paintings seem to somehow encapsulate a sensory healing process which emanates from the surfaces and colours, and the revealed processes within. There seems to be a musical element too in some of the work, especially in the application of paint which seems to contain much movement especially in the more abstract pieces such as “Evensong” and “The Gloaming”. The title of the exhibition itself comes from a song by Kate Bush.
There is also a sense within the exhibition of a deep engagement with current contemporary painting, and the history of painting too, and there were several occasions when I thought of many different painters contemporary and historical. Hurvin Anderson, Alvaro Barrington, Odilon Redon, Graham Sutherland (Vespers) and even the infra red photos of Richard Moss ( Japanese Garden and To the Wedding) and Per Kirkby (Biomorphic Botanic).
The Colour is both exuberant and at the same time thoughtful. Some of the colours, and paintings have elements of decoration, of flowers and foliage but the colour is often unearthly, beguiling and has a great power in itself. When entering the show one is struck immediately by the boldness and the purity of the colours. The colour is purposeful , often symbolic and literal revealing memory and imagination. The pink is that of Geraniums ( a particular favourite flower of Carrie’s) for its associations with both Mike and their respective families’ love of the flower, her own love emanating from the colour and for the memory it holds. This is further explored in posts on her instagram, where flowers and colours become a conduit for acts of love and healing. There is a beautiful Instagram post I recall of steeping Amaranth flowers in hot water to make intense colours . I was reminded of these posts when looking at the paintings.
In Paintings such as “Mistress of Crewell” figures seem to emerge and dilute , sometimes as if half forgotten or remembered. There is a sense of weird unearthliness and also of both time past and time remembered, interwoven. The material and diluted forms also made me think of shrouds , perhaps again suggesting the importance of the material left, symbolic perhaps also of the life lingering on and left within the image. Lately I have been reading an insightful book by Dr Jennifer Johnson about the largely under-sung painter Georges Rouault which explores the materiality of the artist’s work and also in connection to Gustave Moreau and symbolism which I couldn’t help thinking about also in relation to Carrie Stanley’s work.
The showing here is in a Elizabethan small gallery space, but somehow this makes it all the more touching for me to be with, and close up with. Sometimes in countless white galleries, you can lose the essence of and the sensory experience of painting.
This exhibition felt personal, surrounded almost as if you are in the artist’s studio itself. The paintings despite their elegiac feeling, are full of life, hope and seem to embody a rare searching quality, which somehow emanates and expands from within each painting. Most of all though there is a sense of urgency , and aliveness and a deep presence within them all. They are all individually special in this intimate and gently powerful show.
Mark Rowan-Hull April 2024
