Blackbird Rook presents…
Feeling into the shape of another
Tom Crawford and Ellie MacGarry
December 12 – January 16, 2024
An exhibition of new work by Ellie MacGarry and Tom Crawford. Here, the two painters are placed in conversation, where they consider themes of desire, the creative process, commitment and not knowing.
A conversation between Tom Crawford and Ellie MacGarry
TC: I was wondering where we could start our conversation and realised we’ve spoken about the artist Mary Heilmann before, who I came to quite late. I love her paintings now and think about them often. I feel like Save the Last Dance For Me holds many of the tensions of push and pull that are present in our work. Also Neo Noir, the painting of brightly coloured rectangles, seen through a veil of dark prussian blue. That relates to a lot of your work, where we peek through layers of clothing or between figures and limbs. She’s obviously a person who loves colour, which is another thing I think we both celebrate.
EM: It’s funny that you mention Neo Noir, because in 2015 I made a work, which was a low table sculpture that was made out of plywood and painted - and it was basically a rip-off of Neo Noir. I think I called it ‘A Table for Mary’, so at least I admitted it. She was a big influence on me then, around the end of my BA degree and the year or so after. I remember books about her talking about wabi-sabi in relation to her work, which is to do with the acceptance of transience and imperfection in traditional Japanese aesthetics. I think it’s also to do with embracing incompleteness. I love it as an idea but I feel like my work has become more inclined to my fastidious nature in recent years.
TC: I hadn’t heard of wabi-sabi before, that makes total sense in relation to her work. Those moments of dripping or bleeding under tape are so active. I really enjoy imperfections in other people's work. Or at least looseness. It’s something that I have to make happen in my own work as I’m also more uptight than I’d hope to be. I remember seeing a poster for the Morandi exhibition at the Estorick Collection on the Underground recently and immediately thinking of your work for some reason. We’ve never spoken about his work, but I love almost everything about those paintings. They seem like they’re painted really quickly, from life, in a moment where light happens to hit the objects in just the right way. I love how the surfaces and lines are so wobbly and rough, the gestures and the flaws.
I feel like they inform loads of painters after him, like Philip Guston or Raoul De Keyser or even Rose Wylie. I guess they contain something elemental to painting, which is about commitment and the pursuit of something out of reach or unknown. When I saw that show I couldn’t get over how freshly painted they seemed even though they were painted in the 30s or 40s. They looked almost wet, like they’d just been finished. I really got the sense that he’d pushed that wet paint around until he was happy with it. And only when he was happy with it would he stop and then the paint would have to catch up and dry.
EM: I have serious respect for Morandi’s single-minded commitment. I think I learnt a lot from him early on, especially in terms of putting together colours with the same tonal value, and managing to communicate a sense of light without having to paint in the light.
I saw the Philip Guston show at Tate last week. In the film at the end he said about one of his paintings of a pile of limbs, ‘it’s all about the little openings, otherwise you couldn’t breathe, it would be unbearable’. I think about openings so much in my work, without them often a painting just doesn’t work. They are a necessary valve.
TC: That image of entangled limbs in the Guston painting is so claustrophobic until you notice those gaps. I don’t think I’ve given much thought to paintings breathing before, but I’m enjoying thinking about paintings as living things. I guess Philip Guston’s paintings are unusually bodily. I feel like your compositions are tightly balanced in many ways. They are often tightly cropped whole parts of bodies.
EM: In some recent works I have leaned even further into the tightness or symmetry, it almost becomes mirroring. At times I try to actively push back against my natural tendency towards control and clean lines. In Nuar Alsadir’s book Animal Joy (which I read and loved this year) she writes about ‘the danger of overwriting, shining the surfaces, airbrushing, combing out the knots.’ I often find that the way people write about writing chimes so accurately with how I feel about painting. She quotes poet Derek Walcott who said that “the lines I love now have all their knots left in”. I think there is definitely value in the knottiness.
TC: Yes, lots of that resonates with me. Especially the relationship to language and how that can be crafted or overcrafted. I really like that image of combing out the knots in relation to art making. I read a lot of short stories and am really excited when they become so short that they start to encroach on poetry in form. I don’t think it’s necessarily important how they’re labelled, but I’m fascinated by the ways in which language operates at that scale.
EM: I can see that danger of over-combing with your recent work - especially where you have been working on raw canvas with water so that the paint bleeds and it is out of your control. It feels like it has a time sensitivity. You said something the other day about applying water to the canvas and then the paint, and returning a few days later to find that it hadn’t behaved in the way you thought it would. I like the idea of it having a life of its own and how that intercepts with your expectations. The water is continuing the work after you leave.
TC: Yes, I feel like there’s something new happening in those paintings, although I’m finding the process quite frustrating. There’s definitely a tension between the surface and time in the way you described. I’m trying to work intuitively and wait for images to emerge, but because I want to leave the raw canvas exposed, I have to be careful not to overwork them. I’m having to think about the space I’m leaving as much as the space I’m painting, which I guess is similar to this idea of vents and space to breathe.
I’m also excited about what they’re responding to, which feels new to me. I’m thinking of them as being related to nature more than previous work. A slightly dark or scruffy side of nature, possibly not far from the city; the dried out remains of kills and skeletons in marsh lands. There’s an animal spirit running through them somehow.
EM: I can see that animal spirit. While there often seems to be form borne of the built world in your paintings, others relate to something soft-edged rather than hard - a leaf, a seed pod, an unknown creature. Alsadir quotes the definition for empathy in German as meaning ‘feeling into the shape of another’. I like thinking about the slippery representations in both of our paintings as having this ability to slip into the shape of another, into someone or something’s skin. And perhaps that also relates to the ‘other’ who has entered into the frame of some of my recent paintings - the doubling, or the pair in communion with one another, or multiplying torsos.
TC: Yes, that’s so interesting. I read a great book in the summer that relates to this, called The Peregrine by J.A Baker. In the book the author records a diary of his encounters with Peregrines around fields and marshes in Essex. He obsessively follows them, desperately trying to make a connection. He inspects their kills and describes the smell and texture and what he imagines the taste to be like. At times he even speaks from the perspective of a bird during hallucinatory passages where he seems to be trying to become the bird.
There are definite parallels to the processes of feeling through that you’re talking about. Every day he goes to the same group of fields, walks the same paths in an attempt to familiarise himself with those birds. The repetitive process of walking, looking and longing for transformation or meaning to unfold feels very familiar. Similar to the commitment of Morandi to those vases and pots and to painting more generally.
I was thinking of your recent paintings of figures in architectural space in relation to this. They’re like rooms made out of window frames, or screens and canvas supports. It feels a bit like the process of making, feeding back into the subject matter. I really like the interplay of flatness within those spaces. The simplification of the clothes and figures. A bit like the gloves in other works of yours.
EM: The Peregrine sounds great. I like that you can see the window frame as making a room. I am always toying with how little information can make something happen. I wonder whether the fact that you see canvas supports in there is to do with how the image of the frames or windows relates to the edge of the painting. In one painting ‘Window (Dressing)’ there is a cross going through nearly the whole painting, which feels a bit like an X-Ray through to the cross bar. Almost as though the canvas itself is transparent. I have always liked thinking of space in painting like a stage set, things slotting in just in front of one another within a very shallow space.
TC: I really enjoy the way you play with space in that painting. How a thin veil shifts between the background and foreground. It sets a tension that’s strange and confusing.
In some of my work there are moments of flitting between things. So in one moment the viewer might think they’re looking at the outside of a building and then the next moment that might seem like figures floating in a landscape. Maybe it’s about sustaining attention or slowing down the looking so that the viewer can get lost in the image.
EM: I love how that happens in your work, there is an openness when it comes to form. I think it functions in an even stronger way when looking at lots of your paintings together. Perhaps because of the scale shifts, and depending on colour and application of paint, the sense of what is on top of what flips around.
TC: Yes, it’s interesting how those variations come about. More and more I try to start from a place of uncertainty. Philip Guston talks about that in the film you mentioned before. That moment in his practice when he’s moving away from abstraction, making these quick ink drawings then looking around and searching for meaning in the objects scattered around his studio. I find that so inspiring. He really embraced not knowing. I like the idea of feeling through, as a process, as well as feeling the emotional impact of the world and expressing it somehow. I’m often most excited by culture when I don’t understand it, so I think that starting out at a point of uncertainty can be really valuable.
We’ve spoken a bit about repetition in our work. Sometimes I start a work by repeating something I’ve made before, knowing it will be erased. I have these motifs that pop up all the time. Grids, spots, faces, buildings, windows. I wonder what you think about that in relation to the themes in your work. I find it reassuring to see this type of repetition in someone else’s work and noticing how they develop. When we spoke the other day you pointed out how your bows that had been on the backs of dresses or as bow ties, had become the structure for the more architectural spaces. But that these bows had started off as a quote from another artist.
EM: My work is definitely generative - each painting sets a path for another. Sometimes the motifs are more like signs. The hand has been a particularly useful sign for me, allowing me to explore touch, boundaries, space, tension, entering, longing. Bows had cropped up in my work before, but they have become much more prominent recently. I am drawn to the idea that a bow is two ends of the same length coming together and wrapping around each other, to make one form. They hold things in place, they hold tension, they decorate bodies and objects. I began making this connection between the form of the bow and the form of the window. And this was made more concrete through re-encountering the way that René Daniëls has used the bow tie/room repeatedly, to toy with this duality of form. Repetition is key in his work, both within each painting and within the larger body of work. Painting really comes alive for me when it can operate on this level, where visual connections encourage you to see things differently.
TC: I wondered if you could talk a bit about the relationship between the emotive and the political in your work. I feel like there are really interesting layers to your imagery, they’re playful, but there’s a sensuality and seriousness to them too. Desire is everywhere; and for different things; for personal or social relationships. They’re so tactile and at times intimate. Sometimes that comes out in the thin obsessive surfaces, the closeness of nearly touching hands or the transparent clothing. Has that always been in your work or do you think it’s a response to the world and the politics shaping our experience?
EM: I do think about desire a lot, in a very broad sense, and it seems to have become more and more overt in my work. There is tension in my paintings to do with contact, or connection; with the self, others, things or the world. I think desire is at the root of the whole practice of artmaking for me, the erotic as a lifeforce in the Audre Lorde sense.
Recently I have been thinking about the many selves we have, how complicated it is to hold different opinions and feelings from day to day, and how we communicate them. But I have also been considering how we relate or connect with one another. There is a great relief in painting for me, in that things don’t feel as fixed down as they do in words.
When I look back on different bodies of work it is easier for me to see how they connect to political or social conditions. I was thinking a lot about leaky buildings, borders and our connection to the land when I made a series of paintings in 2021 of a figure semi-immersed in a body of water. As an island-dweller, the sea feels like the edge - the end of something and the beginning of the in-between, before reaching another country.
