Conversation Pieces

a curated collection of paintings and writings around the theme of talk/conversation/dialogue/discourse …

… where I ruminate on the nature of conversation, on how living on a small island offers ocean metaphors to complement more familiar landscape metaphors of talk, and invite you to look deeply into the details of a selection of paintings. I offer a close encounter with a set of abstract paintings Conversations with Ideas, made as part of a residency at Cinepoetics, Berlin, and some very recent paintings and collages, more figurative but also abstract, made during lockdown when in-person conversations were restricted and most of our talk went online.

part 1

We are always in the flow of dialogue…

with the self, with others

with imagined others

with the imagined self

with memory

with ideas

we face ourselves in the other

listening with attention

to better know the person inside, where they come from, what’s between you

Talking to each other

the human impulse to make sense
the moral imperative to try to understand

constructing ourselves and our interlocutors out of fragments of shared understanding
and sometimes, as essayist Lydia Davis describes it, the thrilling recognition of truth

listen to yourself

catch the whispers of your intuition

Look more deeply …

at how strokes approach each other, meet, overlap, continue

the space between us

a space of sense-making where meaning surfaces

my meaning, your meaning

and the space between meanings

seascapes of words and the distance between us

Living on an island connected to the mainland by ferries gives a new appreciation of how the sea between islands was the highway in earlier times. People travelled by boat along ancient routes - Irish saints came here, Vikings, and, more recently, holiday makers from the industrial towns of Scotland. This map from the Isle of Bute museum shows the steamer routes in 1914. Now there are just two.

Strangely enough, a year before visiting the museum and finding this map, I had made the following collage/drawing as part of a project called Undoing the Arrangement which involved cutting out the flower arrangements from photographs and considering the space of their absence. The title Too Many Ferries came from a discussion with my son in New Zealand as to why only two ferries connected North and South Islands and deciding there would not be enough traffic to sustain more.

After many layers of process and paint, Too Many Ferries eventually became a large painting on canvas. Embedded in the painting is the connection with the ‘va’ and its metaphorical sense of relationships and connecting through talk.

the routes between come and go over time …

we live in a world filled with Talk

the brush in dialogue

As a painter, it often feels like I am in conversation with the emerging painting. In Indigo Conversation, I was trying out three tubes of indigo from different manufacturers looking for a replacement for my favourite variety. Same name, very different contents. The brush moved across the paper as if recording a dialogue between the different shades and thicknesses of indigo, which each had their own style of ‘speaking’ and their own point of view to put across.

A conversation about the very idea of indigo.

deep in conversation, we find ourselves by differentiating ourselves

You will find indigo in most of my paintings, and it is one of the ingredients, along with Burnt Umber, that I use to mix my own black. Adding white produces a delicious range of moody greys that I find around me on the west coast of Scotland.

the conversations we hold

and the paintings we see

the eye moves around the painting, looks underneath, follows a track and leaves it, changes direction

underneath lie layers of experience, contributing to meaning…

discourse dynamics

My work in the academic world of Applied Linguistics included research into how people use metaphor when they are talking with each other. As a result of analysing many recordings of conversations, I developed a theory that I labelled “Discourse Dynamics”.

Now I paint those dynamics.

The next bit of reading takes us deeper into the complexity of dialogue. I am inspired by my conversations over the years with ideas from Complex Dynamic Systems. Put briefly, complex systems are those where everything is connected, and in dynamic systems, everything is changing. Put together, in complex dynamic systems, everything is connected and always changing. Eco systems are complex and dynamic. Conversation is, somehow, complex and dynamic. And so is painting, somehow, maybe metaphorically.

Below are two extracts from an academic article: The Discourse Dynamics Approach to Metaphor… The full journal article can be read by clicking here.

The second extract on discourse dynamics begins with a snippet of transcribed conversation - pages and pages of these transcriptions were the data for my analyses.

conversation as paths across a landscape

moving at different speeds, offering different possibilities

Conversations while walking

Side-by-side, looking in the same direction, sharing the space, walking conversations can be the very best kind of talking together.

attending to detail, noticing what is offered

and the soft connections of echoes, remindings and allusions

continue the conversation

Thank you for spending time here. Do share your thoughts and the connections you made below. And let me know if you’d like to join the mailing list for future events and Newsletters.