Artist Statement II: Telling Invisible Stories

Summary

Plan B is a violent book by Chester Himes published posthumously in 1993, but I chose it for the title of a series of paintings made as a result of two periods of residency at Tate St Ives in 1998 and 1999. The paintings (Figures 27–29) recall terrifying experiences related through desperate narratives across the centuries by runaway slaves, escaping hostages, fleeing migrants, bombed communities and battered women. The work exposes the dilemma of deciding whether to endure the dangers of a current violent situation or risk life-threatening events during the process of escape. The painted interiors suggest locked rooms in remote coastal locations with sealed windows that look out on to deep and perilous seas. The texts I used as part of the work are all invented but without doubt were created as a result of many decades of reading a huge range of published diaries, letters, novels, poems and memoirs written by women. Each text devised for the double paintings was written and rewritten so that the passage of 75 or so words would start ‘inside’ the conflict but then end in some sort of resolution or hope of resolution. Each passage was then painted to encourage a repeated and yet confused reading; something to be endured. The works on canvas were painted in the north of England over the period of a year in a depressing atmosphere of dark skies and driving rain, in among the day-to-day work of teaching fine art students; the series of around one hundred paper works made in St Ives across two one-month periods were fabricated across 12-hour days from sunrise to sunset in a cold lifeguard's hut on the beach in front of the gallery. None of it was leisurely and all of it felt desperate and dangerous, uncomfortable and somehow final.

Venetian Maps (Figure 30), a series of nine large paintings, told the secrets of hidden Black lives obscured by history and circumstance. The series contained the narratives of great love stories shattered because they were too dangerous to reveal, and the stories of revolutions in which key protagonists were erased from the picture.