Reflections on my artist residency with the Berghof Foundation 1: The original vision

Because I believe that the poetic power of dynamic painting and the quiet intensity of the painter’s studio can re-energise and re-connect people, back in 2018 I devised a version of an artist residency to offer to organisations. It was based on my earlier, rich experiences of a residency in Cinepoetics center for advanced film studies at the Free University Berlin.

Below: Studio Interludes at Cinepoetics, 2016-17

Central to my original vision was the ‘studio space’ to be embedded inside the organization. The artist would set up a studio in the organisation’s offices, and work there, connecting with people, learning about their work and responding to it through making art. The growing studio would offer a place to look, to notice, to connect, to explore. People would be invited into the space to experience the painting process and to make some art, alone and collaboratively, to breathe, to reflect and to refresh.

I was delighted that, back in 2021, it seemed possible to trial the vision with the Berghof Foundation in Berlin, working with people committed to peace building and conflict transformation. Coronavirus, of course, wrecked most of those plans. But it also opened alternative possibilities.

In this series of posts I reflect on what we managed to do instead, looking for insights and possibilities that may be useful in future.

Intuitive painting

When I became a serious painter, I needed to release my intuition from its quiet years, silenced in the service of logical reasoning.

I wanted my intuition to be more active in my painting practice and processes.

So I went to the master - or mistress, perhaps - of expressive arts, Chris Zydel. With her, I learnt how to let my creative voice be heard and to find there ‘the colour, shape or image that wants to be painted next’. And then to attend to what turned up in the painting process and explore what was offered as insight into my emotions and my life.

I’ve recently completed her teacher training course and graduated as a ‘Master Facilitator of Intuitive Painting and the Expressive Arts’.

Now I am preparing my own workshops to take this practice forwards, and develop my own way of working with her brilliant ideas.

Watch this space! And sign up here to receive the latest news!

On the hunt for astonishing art in the Hamburger Bahnhof

To Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof Museum to see some contemporary art . The main exhibition called “Church for Sale” was what brought me there but inspiration and astonishment came from other exhibitions.

“They transfer found images and commercially available objects into the realm of art, opening up a horizon of meaning that goes beyond their original use.”

Maybe I’ve just got too familiar with this kind of conceptual transfer but I didn’t personally encounter newly extended horizons of meaning that contributed to my political or social awareness. This kind of work quickly loses its novelty and there has to be more beyond the novelty. It’s hard to fix, or describe, what that ‘more’ might be when claiming a place in the ‘realm of art’. The best I can do for the moment is to show 3 artworks that spoke to me and seem to deserve such a place.

From the Berlin Biennale, two pieces caught my attention: Birender Yadav’s Walking on the Roof of Hell and Tammy Nguyen’s paintings of the stations of the cross. In the exhibition of new acquisitions, I found the room-size installation Museum of Ostracism, created by Sandra Gammara Heshiki. Each reveals a deep concern for social justice at heart, and each for me is an artwork, in that the eye is caught, held, fascinated by materials, composition, form, colour, making. I’ll place photos of them below for your attention.

Walking on the Roof of Hell, Installation view

I related to the colours, textures and shapes of the wooden sandals in their arrangement on the floor. When I read about their purpose and looked at the photographs of feet, I felt appalled and sad. My empathy was activated by seeing feet in detail - memories of cutting my grandaughter’s tiny soft toenails and of rubbing cream into the weary feet of my mother when she was ill.

These paintings were so beautifully done - I gazed for ages at the brush strokes, the layers and the overlapping colours. I found the collages of ships and use of metallic paint. Again, the title information surprised me and sent me back to look at the content more closely, trying to find the fragments of the figure of Jesus and the details of the setting.

This display astonished me by faking a traditional museum display so cleverly - trompe l’oeil painting created 3d effects on flat sheets of acrylic. I was then forced to reconsider my initial reactions to the ‘objects’ and think about the fact that I found them intriguing and inspiring as artworks. I was taken in by the installation - how far have I been taken in by years of museum-visiting and by art history…? I’m still thinking about that.

Jan Martel suggests that good art is art that astonishes:

To be astonished is to be caught unawares by the revelation of realities denied or repressed in the everyday. Astonishment has an intellectual as well as an emotional component – in it, the brain and the heart come together. Far from distracting us from the strange and the uncanny in life, the astonishment evoked by great artistic works puts them square in our sights. The work demands that we feel and think the mystery of our passage through this body, on this earth, in this universe. We realize afterward that the world is not what we thought it was: something hidden, impossible to communicate though clearly expressed in the work has risen into the light of awareness, and the share of the Real to which we are privy is proportionately expanded.

J F Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action

(a good read - this quote was gratefully re-found on barbararachkoscoloreddust.com)

Almost-an-artist-residency: How did we get here?

I have arrived in my beloved Berlin to start work with the Berghof Foundation for the next three weeks. This residency emerged from my desire to experience more of the rich working alongside in dialogue that I became aware was possible during the two years (2015-17) I spent in Berlin as artist-in-residence and Senior Research Fellow at Cinepoetics Center for Advanced Film Studies, Freie Universität. I discovered then the deep delight of painting alongside people who were engaged in a quite different world (in this case, film theory) and yet who were willing to explore connections with my practice. My work was invigorated – by the city, by the films we watched together, by our discussions about metaphor. I invited people to share my studio space at intervals and they went away refreshed, thinking a little differently after experience with paint and colour and form.

Complex connections (detail), acrylic and marker pen on crumpled paper, Lynne Cameron, 2022

After this, I developed my own version of an artist residency within an organisation, that would not only be about my work as influenced by the organisation but also about sharing some aspects of studio practice – the commitment, the joy of getting lost in painting, the excitement of emerging ideas. 

Out of respect for their work and to connect with my long term interest in conflict transformation, I offered to trial this model of a residency with the Berghof Foundation. Coronavirus, and the need for people to work from home, has changed the residency model yet again, to online mode. Having developed an online ‘un-residency’, I realised that this had the very positive advantage of being able to be carried out from anywhere, including Berlin.

 So here we are!

My temporary studio, with the painting Complex Connections

I’m not based in the Berghof Foundation office but up the road in Prenzlauer Berg in an apartment where I’m setting up a small temporary studio. I’ve carried a few supplies from UK and will replenish them from the riches of this city. So far I have some lovely cardboard to paint on (a box from the local Aldi), five Molotow markers from the nearby store that sells aerosol paints, some post-it notes, and some thin paper that was used for wrapping paintings in my suitcase.

I am really ‘trusting the process’, and excited to find out what can happen in the next three weeks of this almost-a-residency, working alongside in dialogue.

Surfaces, and the difference they make

The cracked and broken surfaces I've been creating recently in my painting seem to speak to the storms and the destruction of Ukrainian homes and lives we are being forced to witness this week.

Wood and then canvas were traditional surfaces for oil paint. I learnt years ago how to stretch canvas on to wooden stretchers and prime it with rabbit skin glue (nowadays no rabbits are involved) and chalk gesso to create a smooth and not-too-absorbent ground to receive the paint. I experimented with various kinds of textured surfaces made with thick gesso or by placing torn paper, pumice, or sand into the gesso. About five years ago, I started ripping up words on paper and sticking those on to create surfaces that hold fragments of meaning as well as texture (below left).

 During lockdown I’ve developed this process, gluing torn up poetic writing on to large sheets of watercolour paper. I was first removing all the spaces between words, and in the last months have relented and included blank strips (above right). It seems to matter that the base layer of paper is mostly covered with these word-sized strip of thinner paper. The process of writing and ripping focuses my attention on the words and becomes a stage in editing the poems. Tearing and gluing opens up a place for contingency – accidental overlaps, juxtapositions or gaps.

Once I start laying paint on the surface more unpredictability follows - in how colour is absorbed, in how far words are covered or allowed to appear. The surface interacts with the image continuously during painting. Painting is a process of both adding and removing, and the textured, layered surface reacts unpredictably. Sometimes further textures are created as the top layer of painting is rubbed off and over-painted.

I’m finding the complexity and uncertainty of painting on layered surfaces produces images that feel particularly tender and hard-won.

It makes all the difference, acrylic and collaged writing on paper, Lynne Cameron

Vertical at last

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.

Lockdown, acrylic on 4 canvas panels each 280 x 70 cm, Lynne Cameron 2020

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.

Art and conflict transformation - a new journey begins

I have recently hosted two workshops from my Scottish studio for staff from the Berghof Foundation in Berlin. This is a wonderful NGO that works in peace-building and conflict transformation, and today they celebrate their 50th birthday. I find their mission statement profoundly moving and important:

• While conflict is inevitable, violence is not. We bring people in conflict together, creating space for conflict transformation.

I'm delighted to be working with the Berghof Foundation as artist-in-residence as part of their 50th anniversary celebrations. There will be lots more to share with you about this partnership when I travel to Berlin to spend time in their office, hopefully in the spring of 2022. Meanwhile, Zoom allows online studio visits and we have begun exploring connections between art and conflict transformation.

This week we looked at the work of Issam Kourbaaj.

Dark water, Burning world Issam Kourbaaj

And before that at the Throne of Weapons in the British Museum.

Throne of Weapons, Cristovao Canhavato (Kester)

My own painting practice connects with conflict transformation through its underlying values and themes - “attending to the beauty in our damaged world and to our brave attempts at building relationships across misunderstanding and conflict”.

Farming again, acrylic on card, Lynne Cameron, 2014.

This painting came out of visiting conflict transformation practitioners in northern Kenya several years back. We stopped to notice a new fence in the landscape and heard how important it was as a symbol of decreased violence in the area. People who had been too scared to farm had returned to their land and started digging to plant crops.

I am excited by the two-way interaction of the Berghof residency and to seeing how this influences new work.

"I will have to burn all I have achieved" - a reason for painting

My eye was caught by a newspaper headline on 16 August: “I will have to burn all I have achieved”, an unnamed woman in Kabul, speaking as the Taliban came closer to the city.

This cry pierced me, straight to an imagining of the precious achievements of a woman’s life becoming a danger to hold on to. What might need to be burnt? I imagined her paintings, her diaries, her writing, her certificates, all the evidence of an active life. Looking at what these things have meant in my own life, I was angry and sad.

I took all these feelings to the easel that day to make a painting. I took the hot colours of burning, of my compassionate anger, and realised that this was to be applied, not with a brush, but with my hands. I needed to feel the paint meeting the paper, to move it and mix it with my fingers into an intense core of energy, with three smaller bursts elsewhere on the surface. When that first impulse was spent, I wrote the quote on to the paper so that it would be integrated. There was a need for ultramarine blue drops – the paint was mixed to the right consistency, the painting placed horizontally, and the blue dropped across the white paper.

The embryonic painting sat like this on the easel for several days, as if its energy were so strong and self-contained, it would have nothing added. Eventually viridian green was required, in paths made by broad brush strokes. Followed by narrower, orange gestures that moved across and around, dividing the white space and beginning to structure the painting as a whole.

Several sessions were spent painting two tones of pale yellow and then grey into the forms created by the gestures. The grey paint suggested a blocking in of the three small bursts of colour, taking me back to work about memory made 9 years ago. Three abstract ‘flowers’ arrived, vitally alive.

One late afternoon as I passed the painting, it seemed to ask for a section of the burning core to be displaced. I cut out a section, stuck it elsewhere on the painting, and filled the space with card painted black. Blankness and displacement, loss and the echoing reminder of what had to be burnt.

Another day brought another kind of energy for this project, and I heard a request for indigo, very wet paint brushed and sprayed all over the painted surface, moved around, removed to reveal and retain under-layers as part of the emergence of the final composition. The finishing touches of paint brought back colours that had been covered, so that something of each stage remains active in the finished painting.

To turn and meet it head on

My current studio reading (each morning, a chapter to start the day) is The Memory of Memory by Russian writer Maria Stepanova. Today I reached the chapter where she writes about Charlotte Salomon, the young German woman who painted a huge collection of paintings with words that she called Life? or Theatre? I discovered Charlotte Salomon’s work some  years ago via a second hand bookshop in Berlin (ah, Berlin!) and blogged about it here. Her work inspired me to think differently about my own ‘dynamic’ painting, to take the idea of ‘painting my life’ more seriously as a major part of my practice.

Prior to The Memory of Memory, I read my way through Griselda Pollock’s recent volume on Salomon. She takes on the tricky task of siting Life? or Theatre? in art history. It was a tough job because this collection (of paintings, overlays, writing, and musical connections) does not slot easily into an art historical form, genre or line. It is, suggests Pollock, more of an ‘invocation’ of people and events than a representation, with a ‘complex aesthetic architecture’. It is ‘her own reclamation of life in the face of her own trauma’ and yet it is not strictly autobiographical. It is some kind of ‘restaging of the past’, cinematic ‘stagings in the theatre of memory, spatialised in pictures’.

Another art historian, Astrid Schmetterling, sees Charlotte Salomon as creating a space of uncertainty, neither part of the dominant culture nor separate from it, in which and for which she makes her work.

As to what Charlotte Salomon was doing with memory in her work, I love how Stepanova captures it in today’s reading:

The extent of memory, its ability to catch those who try to evade it, depends directly on whether we can turn and meet it head on.

This is how I see my task as a painter and writer, to turn and meet my lived experience head on. Taking this task seriously and working out how to do it underpins my painting practice. When the work falters, it is often because I’m scared of that turning, or because there’s too much uncertainty about the space that I make for myself. Then it’s time to look back at artists like CS, and take courage once more, to turn and meet it head on.

Studio and painting as spaces of uncertainty, 22 August 2021.

A note of sadness

I have lost a dear friend, Eileen Rositzska, who died suddenly last week. I met Eileen during my time in Berlin, after she returned from studying in Scotland, completing a PhD researching war movies. Eileen had a special kind of energy about her. It turned out that she was musically gifted, writing the music and words for her own songs, playing keyboard and guitar. The musical side of her life mattered so much to her and I loved our collaborations. She came to play her keyboard at the finissage (closing event) of my Berlin exhibition. She organised trips to several jazz clubs in Berlin, and we saw Elton John in concert. Eileen made things happen and she made them enormous fun.

One day I sent her a video I had made with art made in response to movies, and back came the video with a sound track - she had added a song that she had written.

When I made a second video, she wrote a new song based on the title of the artwork series – Notes in the Dark. Each part of that was wonderful but she also worked out and added the music so that it timed exactly with the video. We gave the video its London première in September 2018, and Eileen flew in from Berlin.

More recently Eileen compiled and sent themed playlists to a group of us who had met online to keep our creativity alive during lockdown. Here’s one of them on the theme of Sparks:

Eileen was indeed a spark that burned bright and illuminated our lives. She gave so much and was so smart. No wonder we feel so deeply sad ~

She sang her own song. acrylic on canvas, 50 x 60 cm. Lynne Cameron, May 2021. For Eileen.

Following lines through abstract paintings

In this post, I reflect on how lines are used in two very recent paintings, zooming in to details of the works to illustrate.

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Sit lightly with your desires acrylic and pencil on paper, 61 x 84 cm, Lynne Cameron 2021

I draw and paint lines across the surface of the paper, continuous or broken lines. Lines curve around and across each other, forming organic shapes. Or lines approach each other but refuse to touch, creating tension.  Or they divide and branch onwards to growing tips.

Lines are pressed into the paper or gently stroked across the surface. A line can be bold or hesitant. Organic curves are drawn with a bold pencil, and stroked with a brush full of paint, at arm’s length, standing and moving from my shoulder. The body makes curves by default. When I paint straight lines, I grip the brush and move from the wrist. Straight lines are so hard to do freehand that I employ masking tape or an edge of card to keep them sharp.

Nature makes curves by default. The stream curves around the beach before meeting the sea. Stones are rounded by the waves. The hills are rounded by years of weathering. The long grass bends in the wind. The body of a small bird curves, a pregnant belly, a child’s cheek. The sea and sky are separated by what looks like a straight line, although it is actually a curve so gentle we cannot see the bending. An occasional slate rocks cracks in lines and right angles.  Otherwise, square and straight requires measurement and machines

In my paintings, straight lines and edges serve to emphasise organic curves through contrast.

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And then there is the ending of lines. As potter Bernard Leach wrote:

“The ends of lines are important; the middles take care of themselves.”

To get smoothly to the end of a line, I need to look ahead and work towards it. Depending on the shape and angle of the brush, the end can form a point, an oval, a frayed edge.

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The soft expanse of the day. acrylic and pencil on paper, 61 x 84 cm, Lynne Cameron 2021

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Discovering a dynamics of figure and ground

 I’ve been immersing myself in recent work, on paper, allowing myself to wallow and float and reconsider what’s happening in the expressing of my lived and felt experience in my paintings. You can glimpse some of the paintings here.

out from under the table and out of the box

Paintings on paper have been piling up under the tables and I decided it was time to give them some undivided attention and notice what’s going on. That led to getting out more paintings on paper from the store room – all those made since I came back from Berlin in 2017. There’s something distinctive about this body of work that I needed to (re)clarify for myself.

It’s not simply that they are on paper - heavy watercolour paper that takes acrylic so beautifully. They are what I called “dynamic paintings” (see here for a description of the process and earlier examples), and are often accompanied by writing of short poetic texts. Some of them become what might more accurately be called painting~poems.

Reading about Gestalt psychotherapy has given me another way to think about dynamics in these paintings – as the interplay between ‘figure’ and ‘ground’. What is figure and what is ground changes continually as the painting progresses - sometimes the figure is, just that, a figure, and at other times the figure is colour and/or form. I paint in order to resolve figure and ground into some kind of unity or harmony. I continue painting until that feeling of unity prevails across the whole painting.

Listening, acrylic on paper, 84 x 61 cm. Lynne Cameron, 2020

Paths not taken

This painting~print did something different than others made at the same time, and that you can see in our exhibition.

It reminded, echoed, whispered.

It arrived quite early on in the exploration of what unmixed indigo and burnt umber might produce when pressed on to a surface. I painted and shaped gesso on to a piece of card, following the lines of the original collage that is mentioned in our exhibition conversation. When it was dry, I painted thick wet paint on top and moved it around by spraying on more water and tilting it.

Then a piece of thin card was pressed on to the wet paint. When I lifted it up, there was a strong contrast between then thickest paint and the wetter areas. Sideways on, there was an impression of rocks, hanging, and a sheltered place where a person might take refuge. I felt I already knew this place.

Below: My improvised ‘studio’ in the apartment and the print before the gesture to Uriel’s scarlet cloak

Some internet searching later, I traced the source of the echo I had heard to this Leonardo da Vinci painting, The Virgin of the Rocks. There are two versions and my reminding came from the one in the Louvre.

The figure at the lower right – with a scarlet cloak - is archangel Uriel. More fascinating browsing followed and learning more about Uriel - in the Anglican tradition, Uriel is recognized as the fourth archangel after Gabriel,  Michael and Raphael. He appears under other names in other faiths and branches of Christianity. The ‘and’ in the title reflects his sometimes present, sometimes absent nature.

If you read my previous blog post, you will realize why the scarlet cloak excited me – not just an echo and a reminding but also a synchronicity! And now you can see why it is placed where it is on this print.

Making art with a focus on process means that each step opens up new possibilities for what to do next. Back in early June I experimented with the geometry of the da Vinci, and read more about archangels. Maybe one day I’ll pick up one of those threads and see where it takes me.

In the end, I followed another path onwards from this round of prints. You can see where it led in the exhibition.

Disappearing horizons

Our online exhibition shares work made during the pandemic and the first lockdown. In the conversation and texts, we tell how the work emerged and how it connects with earlier paintings. There are many connections that we didn’t have time to talk about, some of which have accompanied us over many years. So over the next week, I’ll write a little more about each of these connections for my work in blog posts. Then Alison will do something similar.

I’m starting with a set of three paintings called Disappearing Horizons that preceded those in the exhibition, and that led to the choice of colours in the monoprints and prompted that scarlet stripe.

I was living in central Christchurch in an apartment looking out on to other apartments. In the city, the horizon, where land meets sky, was not visible. I was already missing the wide horizons and indigo skies of my Scottish island, when lockdown took away my compensatory trips to the beach or the hills. In these paintings, I was recalling these disappeared horizons.

I wanted to try a very simple composition of land and sky, with a disappearing horizon between them. I painted a thick layer of gesso on to the card, and, instead of smoothing it decided to make marks into it: wider more open marks in the top ‘sky’ part; edges and rolling lines of contours in the lower part, with a nod to the ’lines’ prints of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. Between the two, I blurred and broke up the ‘horizon’.

Once the gesso had dried, it was time for paint. I wanted indigo for the ‘sky’ and then had the idea of using burnt umber in the ‘land’ and seeing if they might mix into black along the non-horizon. Mixing on the surface needed the paint to be quite wet and the card to be tilted up and down to encourage the colours to meet and join. The randomness and uncontrollability of the mixing added to the ‘disappearing’ of the horizon.

In (3), I wasn’t satisfied with the paint and so applied another layer of gesso. As it dried, I noticed how the indigo and umber remained slightly visible, and liked this as another variation on ‘disappearing’.

Disappearing Horizons (2) gesso and acrylic paint on card, 37.5 x 27 cm, Lynne Cameron, 2020

The painted scarlet strip that goes back to paintings of fences I made several years ago after a working visit to Kenya. Its purpose was to balance both colour and the forms made by the paint on gesso. To find the place where this balance felt right, I painted card with cadmium red light, cut strips of different thicknesses and lengths, and moved them around until one of them ‘worked’. Then painted a strip in that place. 

In (3), the hard edges of the scarlet needed softening and so the wet paint was sprayed with water and allowed to move, just a little, over the surface.

Disappearing Horizons (3) gesso and acrylic paint on card, 37.5 x 27 cm, Lynne Cameron, 2020

As with most of my paintings, the process involved multiple layering. There was intense looking, close up to the paint and from a distance. There were deliberate intentions and more random events - sometimes ‘happy accidents’ but more often a noticing of affordances and responding to ‘what if….?’ There was putting on and scraping or wiping off. Intuitive actions intermingled with carefully thought out decisions. There was stopping and starting again. And at some point there was a leaving be.

See the exhibition and listen to the artists in conversation here

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More collage

At one point, this collage was ‘stuck’ - it didn’t hold together as a whole. More words, more long triangular shapes, more paint solved it.

Memo to self: Keep going!

Apprentice kisses - a language collage

My collaborator for this work is three years old, and making her first marks that mean. I was teaching her to draw kisses for Mother’s Day. She decided on the orange and mixed red and yellow. I collaged.

Stranded

is a photo~poem, developed while walking on a local beach

Stranded, Lynne Cameron, 2020. Christchurch, New Zealand

strand is an old English/Norse word that refers to the part of the beach revealed as the tide goes out, that lies between high tide and low tide. As such, it is a temporary and always shifting space.

There was originally a further stanza to the poem - the choice of photo affects how many words can ‘fit’. The end result is neither poem nor photo, and both poem and photo. I am fascinated, and sometimes frustrated, by the dynamics of interaction between image and verbal meaning.

Composing feels like a process of offering affordances and attending to what emerges —

Concrete poetry, and empathy again

I decided to make a concrete poetry piece by hand. After writing fence in a fence shape at least seven times before it was good enough - because at the last link concentration would lapse and some letter would fall out of place - I have a renewed respect for monks who spent their lives copying manuscripts..

This piece connects to my on-going concern with conflict transformation and empathy. How good we are at building walls and fence to keep the Other out!

Keeping out the Other, Lynne Cameron 2020

Asemic writing

Asemic poetry is made from marks without meaning, often marks that resemble writing of some kind. Meaning comes from the marks themselves and their place in the overall composition.

For a long time, I have been intrigued by how lines can be drawn to cross a page, and the various metaphorical meanings that they suggest. On each of the pages / stanzas, five lines start at the top and work their way downwards, interacting as they go, reflecting how ideas, sounds or images might be entwined in a poem. They are laid out vertically as if a transcription of spoken poetry. The underlying painting reminds us that poetry connects with us as the people we are, of our time and place.

The title references Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and US poet William Carlos Williams, who made works entitled 12 Lines and Lines.

I tried two different paintings as the base layer for this asemic poem. In the one above (one of a series of four panels painted during lockdown), there is an echoing of the intertwining line on a different scale. The painting used below is more dramatic and hints at something like a spoken performance of an asemic poem.

5 Accompanied Lines and Scarlet, Lynne Cameron, 2020
pen on paper, laid on acrylic on paper