It was great to finally unroll these painted panels and hang them at Mt Stuart this week as background for a course happening there. I made the panels back in 2020 when I was in New Zealand, obliged to extend my stay by covid and the stopping of international flights. I painted on the floor of my apartment, hanging them one at a time over the fridge but without space until now to hang all four together.
The panels form a kind of time series of the first lockdown and release as we experienced it in New Zealand. The first panel was started in January 2020 before Covid began to spread, the central pair were painted through the weeks of lockdown and the fourth was completed after we emerged from it.
The idea of painting panels began at the Royal Academy exhibition in 2018, called Oceania, where I encountered work by New Zealand artist John Pule
Back in New Zealand in 2020, I noticed the stems of bindweed twisting through the fence in the car park of my favourite café.
I am intrigued by how constructed modernist grids – a fence, this building – contrast so strongly with natural organic forms, while at the same time offering affordances for growth within, against, and through them.
In a book found in a second hand shop in Christchurch, I saw organic curves drawn 125 years ago for printing on Liberty cotton.
Using embroidery stitches with string, I explored ways of creating fences, and then used the embroidered trellis to print with paint on to the first canvas panel.
The two interior panels, made as the busy city quietened, use muted colours to express the feelings of shock we had, and the cutting off of our normal lives.
The fence reappears in panels 3 and 4, new conventions in which we were able to grow and even thrive a little in our small household bubble; daily walks in the quiet city, games with my little granddaughter, thinking times on the balcony with the bright pink pelargonium.
My then 3 year old granddaughter assisted with the footprints, stamping in purple paint and walking across the canvas as directed.
The gentle chaos of colour in the final panel celebrates our release from lockdown after six weeks, and our return to cafes, parks, and gardens.