Facing institutional injustice, mismanagement and the ever-deteriorating conditions of work in the contemporary university, what kinds of community might artists imagine for themselves outside of this space? In the acknowledgements for their novel The Wastes, the artist Roy Claire Potter writes of the ‘always Sisyphean problem of working in a neoliberal university’s art department’, and recognises ‘friends, peers and colleagues’ who lost their jobs, ‘or otherwise walked away and began to reimagine themselves’. The Pearls and the Oyster, a group show of work by northern women painters at the Birley Studios in Preston, emerges from just such an act of reimagining.
Fuelled by righteous anger about how university lay-offs had unjustly impacted female staff (who were often already on fractional and precarious contracts), the curator of The Pearls and the Oyster, Jayne Simpson, was inspired to create ‘a new evolving model for women artists and painters’ in the north. The project began with a symposium held at the Birley in February 2024, ‘Bananas are not the only paint!’, where discussion centred on the barriers women face in their painting practice and careers, what opportunities for critical feedback might look like outside of the ‘Institution’, and the potential value of establishing an ongoing network. As a next step, Simpson invited twelve painters to contribute a single work of their own to The Pearls and the Oyster, displayed in three interconnecting rooms of the Birley and brought into conversation with each other in the space of a group show. The ‘pearls’ of the exhibition’s title, as Simpson explains to me, are the artists, and she is the oyster-curator: ‘a conduit and a vessel’, whose role is to nurture and nourish the pearls.
The painters in the show take a variety of approaches to their medium and the conversational threads are eclectic. Darkness, decay and the corrosive legacies of structures of power, investment, and neglect form one facet of a traceable dialogue. The lyrical and absorbing abstract forms of paintings by Nancy Collantine and Fiona Stirling are counterpoints to the hyper-realist paintings of a Liverpudlian tunnel ventilation shaft by Mandy Payne and the graffitied motorway bridge by Jen Orpin, ‘Abolish the Parasite Class’ (2024). The decaying surface of Sarah Feinmann’s patchworked collage painting ‘A Neglected Corner’ (2024) speaks to the miniature, rust-stain paintings of Heather Ross’s more conceptual ‘Empire’ (2023-), and to the copper surface of Joanna Whittle’s small-scale, elusive and atavistic oil painting ‘Forest Shrine (Flying Coaster)’ (2023).
Mythic and narrative paintings, such as Katie Tomlinson’s depiction of Medusa at the hairdresser in ‘Sssssself Care’ (2024), or Abigail Hampsey’s expansive meditation on the joys of birdwatching with her sister in ‘Grass in the Heather Lands, Forest of Bowland’ (2024), are counterbalanced by the extended play with colour and pattern in the work of Julie Mayer and its referencing of modernist traditions and aesthetics. And then there are those works that seem to mediate between figuration and abstraction by Roberta Cialfi, Lindsey Bull and Jayne Simpson, expanding our sense of painting’s expressive possibilities. Cialfi’s painting – a close-up of a blooming, vegetal heart in shades of artichoke green and blush-blue, which might transport you to Mediterranean terraces and sun-soaked feasts – is called ‘Sensuous Encounter’ (2023). However, the title describes all three of these artists’ works. In ‘Purple Dress’ (2023), the sumptuous purple gown and blonde bob of Lindsey Bull’s solitary figure is set against a background of banded colour that draws us into the mysterious inner life of this woman, even though her back is turned to us, and we cannot see her face. Simpson’s ‘The Water of the Womb’ (2024) depicts two nude women in the foreground and a veiled figure in the centre and setback, slightly out of focus . Although these women seem to look beyond and past one another, the title of the painting suggests an intimate, familial bond. These figures are suspended in gestural brushwork that is at once alive with affection and darkened by conflict and loss.
Pearls are symbols of resilience, formed in adversity as the oyster coats the grit that threatens to damage it in shimmering nacre. In her foreword to the exhibition catalogue, Simpson introduces the show by acknowledging the adversity women artists sometimes face because of their exclusion from art institutions. She writes that while women ‘make up most of the cohort in Fine Art Education, [they] nonetheless fall behind disproportionately when it comes to professional opportunities after they graduate’. A 2018 study by Kate McMillan found that ‘66% of applications to postgraduate study in the creative arts and design sector were by women, whereas with an almost inverse ratio, 63% of the most senior staff were male’. What effect does this have on our creative and cultural ecosystems?
When I visit The Pearls and the Oyster, an expanded painting project titled ‘The Box’ (2024) is positioned above the entrance to the gallery. ‘The Box’ is a collaborative response by printmakers, designers, and photographers to a poem of the same name written by Isabella Simpson, Jayne’s daughter, who is currently studying at university. In the poem (printed at the back of the catalogue), Isabella writes ‘I wonder when they’ll stop telling me/ To get back in my/ Box’, reflecting on the limited and gendered expectations imposed upon her creatively by peers and teachers. The painting project responds playfully to the poem: a life-size doll of Isabella is simultaneously contained by, and forcing her way out of, the striped fabric costume of ‘The Box’, expanding the constraints imposed upon her even as she feels their limits closing in. ‘The Box’ acts as an intergenerational call to arms and rallying cry not to be bound by the demands of the institution, the market, or other authorities who might wish to define who we should be, or what we should create.
A sense of what binds or restricts us is also articulated in Fiona Stirling’s painting ‘Mid-Life Beige’ (2024). Stirling has developed a method of ‘ad-hoc’ or ‘inbetweener painting’, which reflects the moments of snatched time in which she creates her art around work and caring responsibilities. Although the title of her piece references ‘beige’, Stirling’s approach to overworking the canvas with colour, texture, abstract mark-making, and even the collaging of elements like fluorescent green post-it notes, creates a luminous energy that radiates through a more muted surface. ‘Mid-Life Beige’ might be read as a feminist manifesto, compelling us to seize the reins of the constraints placed on our lives and make something new with them.
What I enjoyed most about this exhibition was the opportunity to look closely and to see where that looking might take me. The ventilation shafts of the tunnels under the Mersey in Liverpool can have a surreal, space-age quality to them, but Payne’s ‘Shaft 1’ (2019), spray-painted with oil on concrete, brilliantly emphasises their dilapidated mundanity. The photo-realist quality of Payne’s work is challenged by an interest in the texture and characteristics of both medium and subject. Paint chipped or scraped from the surface of her concrete canvas replicates (or replaces) the peeling paintwork of the building depicted; the bubbling of paint in the muted sky might give us the sense that we are really looking at the concrete surface of Shaft 1 and not a depiction of it. Where does the painting end and the world begin? At the other end of the spectrum is Nancy Collantine’s ‘Para-Fantasia’ (2024), a painting whose abstract voluptuousness resists any attempt to find definitive signs in the cascade of colour, line and pattern that tumbles down the canvas over a tectonic plane of pink. Sometimes I think I catch a figure, a face, a landscape, and then the painting seems to rearrange itself again before my eyes.
At a poetry reading on a university picket line back in 2019, I read from Anne Carson’s poem ‘Candor’. ‘If you are not the free person you want to be, you must find a place to tell the truth about that’, writes Carson. The Pearls and the Oyster has created a space of candour, where the rich and varied practice of this group of thirteen women artists from the north is celebrated as part of a broader conversation about what contemporary painting might be. When institutions fail you, you have an opportunity to imagine a new community of your own: in the case of The Pearls and the Oyster, this is just the beginning ofan artist-led initiative that hopes to continue to support women painters in Preston and beyond to thrive.
The Pearls and the Oyster is currently running a crowdfunder to secure the future of the network, including a programme of talks, critiques and mentoring. You can contribute to the crowdfunder here.
The Pearls and the Oyster was at The Birley, Preston, 5 October – 2 November 2024.
Francesca Brooks is a poet and writer based in Manchester.
This review is supported by The Birley.
Published 07.11.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
1,489 words
