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 close encounters with a set of abstract paintings Conversations with Ideas, made as part of my 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 steamer routes around Arran (the larger island) and Bute (north-east of Arran) in 1914. Now there are just two routes into and out of each island.

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

thanks for reading part 1 of conversation pieces

click here to go to Part 2

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