Morna Hinton
Royal Iris
The Royal Iris body of work explores issues of displacement, dereliction, loss and nostalgia through the metaphorical qualities of an abandoned Mersey ferry – the Royal Iris - berthed on the Thames since 2002 and gradually disintegrating. I came across her by chance as my picture framer’s studio is next to her mooring, and quickly became fascinated by her story. Previous projects have been connected to my own past, but Iris took me away from personal history and out into the open waters of collective experience. Research was key to the development of my ideas. For example, I found out that Iris once hosted 1960’s Merseybeat bands including the Beatles, carried the Queen on a river trip for her Silver Jubilee, and was the set for an ill-fated 1980's children’s TV show called The Mersey Pirate. Apart from the interest of famous names and popular culture, I started to appreciate her distinctive design. Compared to other Mersey ferries, Iris, launched in 1950, has the style of an ocean liner, and was conceived from the outset as being an entertainment venue (complete with a pillar-less ballroom and air conditioning) as well as a ferry. She served the egalitarian mission of Wallasey Corporation by providing ‘luxury cruises at nominal fares’ as one brochure from the 1950’s put it.
M.V. Royal Iris, moored on the Thames in Woolwich, 2018
Key developments ​
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New subject matter
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Archival research
Through my research, I discovered a wealth of visual and historical material, including archive film, photographs and ephemera. The use of archives has become a key strand in contemporary art - Hal Foster talks of archives as being particularly productive sources because they are 'factual yet fictive, public yet private' (Hal Foster Critical Analysis). Detailed analysis of Beatles’ set lists from 1961 and ’62 (when they played on Iris) revealed that their first big hit, Love Me Do, was more than likely played on the boat. This gave me the starting point for a soundtrack, which initially combined Love Me Do with a prose poem written in the voice of Iris, but which has evolved into collaborations with composers. Through a number of trials I ended up abandoning spoken word in the soundtrack as it felt too prescriptive, although poetry continued to be an influence in the structure of the final film, The Wrong River, which is formed of sections equivalent to stanzas, with split screen shots being comparable to the poetic line. The title came from a line in the original prose poem.The integration of archival material into my films has been challenging as the quality of some of the archive film footage has not been very good – juddery and very low resolution, albeit with a certain charm. In the end, despite the excitement of seeing Iris majestically crossing the Mersey in her prime, I decided not to use the archival footage, but rather to focus on stills and photographs, primarily taken on a visit to the Liverpool Archive Service, but also garnered from many websites and particularly the Facebook group, Friends of Royal Iris.
A selection of the archival sources relating to Royal Iris
Matt Saunders’ exhibition at Marian Goodman at the start of 2018, whose genesis was a poem, and which also combined painting and film, felt very relevant to my own interest in the intersections between visual art and poetry (Matt Saunders Critical Analysis). The 20th-century New Zealand artist Joanna Margaret Paul, who worked across poetry, painting, photography and film also resonated strongly with me when I went to a screening of her work at the Cinema Museum. Critic Eleanor Woodhouse, writing in the New Zealand online publication Contemporary Hum (April 2018), speaks of Paul’s work as being ‘films which are simultaneously constructed poems, and documentary texts that take as their subject matter the poetry inherent in the world’. There are similarities between Paul's short films and the feature films of Andrei Tarkovsky who worked between the 1960’s and 1980’s. There is poetry running through all Tarkovsky's oeuvre, which is no coincidence given that his father was a poet – in one of his most famous films, The Mirror, part of the soundtrack consists of his father’s poems being read. It mixes archival material with music and abstracted images, not to mention the ever-present elements of fire and water. Water also permeates Nostalgia, made in the 1980’s when Tarkovsky was in exile in Italy. The Russian exile protagonist wades through flooded buildings and rain pours outside open windows. Nostalgia is relevant for The Wrong River, both in its subject matter of longing for a distant home(land) and a visual language that uses sepia tones and monochrome are mixed with colour to distinguish different times and places.
1st version of film - Royal Iris, 4:43 mins
The first version of the film used ambient sound combined with spoken word (prose poem) a short clip by one of my composers and excerpts from Love Me Do by the Beatles.
Andrei Tarkovsky, still from Nostalgia, 1983
Joanna Margaret Paul, still from Napkins, 1975
Key development ​
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Different ways film can relate to poetry
3rd version of film - Iris, 5:04 mins
This version was made to go with a piece of music from a composer collaborator that was quite lyrical in tone. I also experimented with birds as a linking theme and explored overlays of birds with the Iris images.
A key reference for the construction of narrative using still images is Chris Marker’s La Jetée, where a whole story is told through black and white photographs. In On Photography, Susan Sontag, while primarily writing about photography is interesting on the distinction between photographs and film; she talks at some length about Chris Marker (Susan Sontag Critical Analysis). Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction speaks of film being viewed in a distracted frame of mind, like architecture, rather than contemplated with concentration, like art. While Benjamin may not have been able to predict the ways in which film now sits within the art gallery and museum, he has a point about the sheer mass of information in even a short video clip – ‘the spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of film…’ (Benjamin).
Chris Marker, still from La Jetée, 1962
In Correspondence O Ilona Sagar succeeds in combining a range of different types of image, from archival photographs, contemporary footage and computer-generated scans by keeping the overall tonality fairly monochrome (Ilona Sagar Critical Analysis). Elizabeth Price’s The Woolworth’s Choir of 1979 adopts a similarly monochrome approach with the addition of captions in a range of different colours, something I tried in an experimental short, Motor Vessel, but found distracted from the archival images (Elizabeth Price Critical Analysis). In The Wrong River I tried out different film stock ‘treatments’ using Lumetri presets in the editing process, as a way of taking the edge off the sharpness of my digital footage and also unifying digital with archival images. Julien Temple’s film Habaneros about the history of Cuba, premiered recently as part of the BBC imagine series, was another good example of the integration of sometimes quite shockingingly violent archival footage with contemporary film stock. He went backwards and forwards between colour and black and white throughout the film and also managed some very successful overlays, something that I have found tricky unless it is something fairly amorphous like water or sky.
Julien Temple, still from Habaneros, 2017
Key development ​
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Increased knowledge of artist film-makers
Final version of film - The Wrong River, 7:54 mins
Unlike earlier films, the final Royal Iris film, The Wrong River, was split screen (although done within one screen so it could be a single projection). A key bit of feedback was that my single screen film was too much like a documentary. The split screen is intended to make it more definitively an art film as well as allowing interesting juxtapositions between the two halves. It also felt like a natural way of organising my material once I had taken crucial step of going to Liverpool and filming
the Mersey and the current 'Royal Iris' ferry (the name was retained by Mersey ferries). I was inspired by Sagar’s work, and the films of John Akomfrah, which are presented across, two, three or more screens. In pieces like Vertigo Sea for example he elicits a dialogue between different times and perspectives through the three-screen format, which is also very sensitively put together in terms of the visual relationships.
John Akomfrah, still from Vertigo Sea, 2015
Tacita Dean’s piece His Picture in Little, part of her recent National Portrait Gallery exhibition is a masterclass of the split screen – her three actors (who are linked by the fact they have all played Hamlet) appear in twos and threes on a jewel-like small screen, which is divided both vertically and horizontally. Dean achieved this using some high spec 3-D printed masks so that she could expose her 35mm film multiple times. The visual links were apparently unplanned – she calls it ‘blind cohabitation’ - though must surely have been teased out in the editing, and anticipated in her direction. For myself, a key principle was to line up the shoreline of the two rivers (I had a lot of 'straight-on' static shots across the Thames and the Mersey). Dean at her best is very good at constructing soundtracks from multiple sources. The soundtrack for The Wrong River took time to develop, and included a piece by one of the two composers I collaborated with, as well as field recordings of water, boats and other river sounds.
In terms of theory I am influenced by Ian Sinclair’s psychogeography and its notion that there reverberations of the past history of a place are felt in the present. In Swandown, his film with Andrew Kötting, this is given a moving image outing (Kötting/Sinclair Critical Analysis). In fact, my practice has become very research-based, which draws on skills from my previous life working at the V&A. Tacita Dean’s project about the Teignmouth Electron, while also having a boat as its subject, more importantly showed me how research might be presented as an artwork in its own right (Tacita Dean Critical Analysis).
Tacita Dean, still from His Picture in Little, 2017
Key developments ​
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Filming in Liverpool
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Split screen format
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Multi-layered soundtrack
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Moving into three dimensions
Royal Iris,
archive photograph
My Iris benches
in the workshop
Installation shot
I wanted to provide seating for the installation of The Wrong River, because the film is nearly eight minutes long. It was also an opportunity to add a three-dimensional element to the presentation. Initially I thought I might be able to buy some suitable vintage seating - perhaps some chairs in the same style as some of the chairs in the ballroom or bar of Iris. Unfortunately nothing was quite right and in any case, they didn't have enough that was specifically 'boat' about them.Reclaimed deck seating was impossible to find so I decided to make two benches myself, based on an archive photograph of the upper deck on Iris.
Royal Iris paintings
At the same time as making the film I continued to paint, needing the physicality of the paint and the brush after all the sitting at a screen editing. The Iris paintings focus on details taken from film stills that home in on the fragile physical state of the boat. They are painted in acrylics on steel, incorporating a patina of rust into the paintings, trying to make the materiality of the painting communicate something about the subject. I feel that they have a certain heft and gutsiness compared to previous work. On the subject of rust, I was interested to see John Keane’s recent series of paintings Twelve Selves at Angela Flowers in April. He employed ‘reactive’ metallic paint combined with inkjet transfers supported on canvases for his series of mug-shots where the image is degraded with rust and verdigris. The idea of the materiality of painting contributing to its meaning is something that I also saw in Michael Armitage’s Chapel series of paintings at the South London Gallery in February. Armitage is Nigerian and paints on bark cloth from Uganda, that is normally used for burial shrouds and ceremonial clothing, which adds a layer to the meaning of subjects that draw heavily on the tradition of European painting.
Michael Armitage, Exorcism, 2017
John Kean, Twelve Selves,
2017-2018
Paula Rego,
The Bride, 1994
Lorraine Fossi,
Royal Iris, 2013
Key developments ​
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Painting on steel
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Use of rust patina within paintings
When defining what to paint, I have very much been driven by the lens – cropping film stills to home in details that are very much informed by Roland Barthes’ theory of the ‘punctum’ – the small emotionally charged elements that he sets in opposition to the ‘studium’, which is made up of the overall image and its typical interpretation by the viewer. Barthes writes that the punctum ‘is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’ (Roland Barthes Critical Analysis). I have also been playing a bit with the idea of Iris as a female personage and exploring her ‘clothing’ of protective mesh and fraying mooring ropes. I realised that the contrast between these textiles and the wood and metal structure of the boat is very similar to my interest in the tension between natural forms and architectural elements. Paula Rego is an artist whose rendering of fabric in paint and pastel is very instructive for me. She is also particularly interested in the female experience.A fellow London painter who has been inspired by Iris is Lorraine Fossi, in whose abstract seascapes the distinctive turquoise, red and rust colours of Iris float. In an interview on Vimeo in 2010, Fossi talks of her personal connection to Iris in that they are both far from home (Fossi is French), and too old (Fossi took up painting as a mature student). Fossi, like me, appreciates the elegiac quality of Iris. There is no point now in thinking of trying to restore her; she is too far gone. As Fossi puts it, ‘her future is through art’.
Everything Changes
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My film Everything Changes had its genesis in a poem I wrote after visiting a studio complex by the Thames Barrier. There was a cafe with an elevated deck, where I sat and had lunch while looking out over the river. It made me think about the only other time that I had ever been near the Barrier, which was in early 1994, on a day when I visited Rachel Whiteread's House in Mile End. In my mind, the two are forever conflated so the poem is about past and present, and how they overlap, as well as the way that time, like water, flows on relentlessly, moving through blocks and barriers. The fact that House was a continuation of Whiteread's breakthrough piece, Ghost, was something I picked up on in the poem, as a metaphor for the ghost of a past relationship and the way that the past haunts the present. House is one of the most memorable pieces of art I have ever seen and was very much in my mind given Whiteread's 2017 exhibition at Tate Britain, where, in my view, her larger works suffered from the lack of context given by the specific places they were made for.
Thames Barrier
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I am by the wide river, high up, but the water
is hidden behind a concrete dyke. Curved blocks
like war-time defences hold it back. Clouds move
through clear sky, chasing the tide. A rusty ship moves
no more, listing on the wall, half out of the water.
Beyond it, the barrier has its gates open but blocks
the view. Years ago, with a new lover, I visited the block
of a ghost house cast in concrete before it moved
into dust. Later we went down to the barrier, by the water.
Everything changes, water moves through blocks.
Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993-94
Geoffrey Farmer, Canadian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2017
My intention with Everything Changes was to make a film that used visual means to develop the themes and structure of the poem, which was in a form called a 'tritina' focussing on three words: 'water,' 'block' and 'move'. Footage of the Thames Barrier and the river is intercut with shots of the concrete wall and covered footway beside it. At the point at which Rachel Whiteread's House is mentioned in the soundtrack, I incorporated a still image of it into the film, and moved into black and white, admittedly a rather well-worn device to suggest the past, but I felt it was justified within the film, which uses a mixture of monochrome and colour. I overlaid footage of the river throughout to pull the film together, much as Geoffrey Farmer used water to unify his Venice Biennale Canadian pavilion installation, experimenting with differing levels of opacity in this watery layer. Initial feedback highlighted that I had inadvertently broken one of the 'rules' of film-making by panning in opposing directions. I corrected this to make it generally consistent, but decided to pan in the opposite direction at the point at which the film moves into the past. The soundtrack is a fairly elaborate construction of different sounds recorded on location, which are layered together with spoken word. This is very much an artifice and is more complex than the soundtrack for my earlier film Woodland Burial. I am interested in the ways in which editing a film is similar to editing a poem – the choice of shots/words, their order, length and juxtaposition. In both cases, it is the part I enjoy most.
Everything Changes, 4:21 mins
Key developments ​
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New subject matter, moving away from bereavement
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Growing expertise in filming and editing
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Experimentation with text and spoken word
A Woodland Burial – Overlap, 01:36 mins
For me, this film was quite a big jump from the snow subjects that I had been engaged with previously. It was also a jump from the past to the present; I wanted to say something about renewal and moving forward. I decided to start the film in black and white and gradually move into colour. The final version that I showed in the Crypt had two overlapping audio soundtracks, where I matched the repeated lines, in order to underscore the forwards and backwards movement through the poem, while at the same time considering musical notions of dissonance and resolution. The overlapping was partly inspired by chance as I had overlaid two audio tracks by mistake, but also by Otobong Nkanga’s installation at Tate Tanks where she has an overlapping soundtrack in different languages, with spoken word as well as song. I was similarly inspired by Tacita Dean’s film Palast, where the soundtrack sounds like naturalistic ambient street noise of traffic and voices, but is in fact an elaborate artifice. Finally, I had been looking specifically at films made in response to poems, e.g. those commissioned by the Poetry Society in connection with the 2016 National Poetry Competition.
A Tree Marks the Spot, acrylic on canvas,
60 x 50 cm
A Woodland Burial
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An angel stands silent by your grave,
marked by a late-flowering cherry.
I hoped the tree would save
some blooms for your death-day in January.
The tree is a late-flowering cherry,
chosen because it flowers
on the day of your death in January –
delicate pink a cheering sight in winter.
I chose the tree because it flowers
from autumn to spring, but it’s sickly,
barren boughs a dismal sight in winter,
when light is scarce and day passes quickly.
I visit in April. The tree is still sickly,
paltry leaf shoots; a month ‘til your birthday.
Daylight is bright and passes less quickly,
daffodils push through the London clay.
The tree looks better on your birthday –
no blossom, but leaves! Maybe it’s saved?
Daffodils wilt in the London clay.
An angel stands silent by your grave.
Cemetery
My concept for the One That Holds Everything Crypt Gallery show was to bring the sunshine, green and life of a summer’s day in a cemetery down into the dark, cold of the under-croft of St Pancras Church. Inspired by the experience of making my first film, Co-existence, I decided to film in Camberwell New Cemetery, where my late husband Martin is buried in the woodland area. As with Shed, I was writing a poem on the same subject in parallel with planning the Crypt piece. The poem took the form of a pantoum, in which lines are repeated through the stanzas using a set pattern. The effect is of not going anywhere fast as it feels like you take two steps forward and one step back. This is good analogy for the grieving process and also for moments of reflection when visiting a grave. I used recordings of bird-song from the cemetery as a background to a spoken word soundtrack on the film. My initial concept was to produce a fairly ‘straight’ film where the poem’s stanzas were reflected in cuts from locked-off views of the cemetery to a shot of the tree that marks Martin’s grave. The tree shot punctuates the film, while a view showing the tree with a stone angel in the background occurs at both the beginning and end, in order to underline the circularity of the narrative – pantoums start and end with the same line.
Otobong Nkanga, In
Wetin You Go Do? 2015
Tacita Dean, still from Palast, 2004
In the painting A Tree Marks the Spot, I focussed on the actual tree marking Martin’s grave. Writing the Woodland Burial poem had made me think hard about the specific nature of the tree (a late-flowering cherry that had taken a while to establish itself) and its redemptive qualities as displayed in new leaf shoots when I visited in spring-time. The image was based on a still from the Woodland Burial film, where the sapling is back-lit, with dark mature trees behind. I wanted to exaggerate this in the painting by dashes of white on the branches and by turning up the dial on tonal contrast. I also tried to create a slight spot-lit effect on the tree by dulling down and darkening the colour towards the edges of the painting.
Gillian Carnegie, Thirteen, 2006
George Shaw, Portrait of an Old Midlander, 2015-16
I had George Shaw’s tree paintings in mind e.g. Portrait of an Old Midlander when deciding to focus on a single tree – there is an anthropomorphic quality to these depictions of individual specimens that resonates for me. The tree very much stands in for Martin in the painting. Gillian Carnegie’s flower paintings were also an inspiration – the precision with which she details the humble bouquet in a cut-off plastic bottle in paintings like Thirteen and Aminadab gives the flowers weight, in the way that I wanted to with the tree in my painting. Something else that occurred to me is that a cemetery is, like a shed, a liminal space. When they were built, cemeteries were located away from the centres of population, as city graveyards over-flowed in the 19th century. I was reading Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’ Edgelands when I made this painting. They reflect on new 21st-century ways of dealing with death, including woodland burial sites, but comment that ‘recycling the dead means we lose the spaces we consecrate and remember them by.’
Key developments ​
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First independent film project
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Shift from past to present in terms of subject matter
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Experimentation with spoken word, inspired by poetry
Co-existence, 2:08 mins
Co-existence
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Co-existence was a collaborative video project completed at the end of the summer term with two fellow students. The brief was to make a film on a subject of our choice, using mobile phones and Premiere Pro editing software over two sessions. This was a key development for me, as it introduced me to film-making, which I had never tried before. It was definitely an 'aha!' moment. Being forced to decide quickly on the subject matter was an interesting process – we sat in the park and talked about things we liked and thought about where the intersections were. The result was Co-existence, a film about the way humans live alongside insects in the urban landscape.
Key development ​
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Film-making
Shed
Shed, Wood, Trees is a series of lino-cuts and was made for the Shoebox exhibition. It is a continuation of earlier snow subjects but had the particular focus of a garden shed, with all its connotations of being a liminal space, where things are stored out of sight and at a distance. Shoeboxes like sheds can be used to store secrets, and the shape of my particular shoebox container with its sloping top also echoed the form of the shed. The prints are closely tied to a poem I wrote using the short tritina form, where three words are repeated as line endings. The poem really helped me identify my focus as well as pointing to deeper layers of meaning – the word shed itself can be a verb as well as a noun, mean to let fall or discard, which seemed very apposite. Marie Ponsot, who invented the tritina called such poems 'instruments of discovery', due to the way the very constrained form forces you to dig down into your subject matter.
Shed
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The garden made us buy that house. The shed
was at the end, pressed in hard by the wood
of the local nature reserve. A stand of trees
reached up to the sky, above the seed trays,
bags and bikes in the damp dark of the shed.
Birch, fir, sycamore and oak – a whole wood
at the bottom of the garden. What would
I give to be with you now, by those trees?
Climbing rope coiled in a bag in the shed.
You shed life. No more sky or wood or trees.
I completed my painting Shed in time for 17m2, the group show in Holborn. Working from a photograph, I made some key changes to the image in order to convey both the metaphorical darkness of the shed (this went from cream to black) and the colouring of the birch tree in front of it, which I deliberately heightened to a glowing yellow, in order to give a suggestion of hope and new life in the midst of the snow. Peter Doig’s paintings influenced me in terms of their dark atmosphere and mysterious cabins hidden in the woods. There is something about the way that he puts together the images that makes them seem a little sinister, e.g. in Camp Forestia with its ghostly white log cabin and chill wintry trees, which was precisely the feeling I wanted in my painting. I also looked at work by the Canadian Group of Seven painters, such as Tom Thomson as I was interested in the way that colour is heightened in many of these paintings. The vivid orangey-yellow of the wooden board showing through the paint in Thomson’s Spring in Algonquin Park makes his birch trees really sing, and this was an inspiration for the way I painted the birch tree bright yellow in Shed. This painting was shown in the Columbia Threadneedle Prize exhibition at the Mall Galleries.
Shed, Wood, Trees, lino-cuts, 15 x 10.5 cm
Key developments ​
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Landscape as metaphor
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Including text within prints
The sequence of four small prints reflected the four stanzas of the poem, presented in the form of a simple zig-zag book incorporating key phrases from the poem. The viewpoint got closer to the shed in each print. I was happy with the graphic elements of the print but dis-satisfied with the way the words looked. They were hand-cut in reverse for printing and appeared rather clumsy and childish. I was inspired by Peter Doig’s etchings and by early 20th-century Expressionist woodcuts by artists like Edvard Munch. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s incorporation of poetry into landscape at his Little Sparta garden was also in my mind.
Shed, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 50 cm
Tom Thomson, Spring in Algonquin Park, 1917
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Little Fields, Long Horizons,1998
Peter Doig, Camp Forestia, 1996
Snow
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Urban landscape has long been the dominant theme in my practice but a key development in 2016 was that I started to explore the metaphorical potential of this in relation to loss. Snow became my motif and my obsession. My husband Martin had died in 2013 during a particularly cold winter with several periods of snow and my last memories of him were bound up with images of a snow-covered London. I was interested in the way snow envelopes, transforms and conceals. It is rich in associations ranging from loss, numbness and grief, to calmness and purity. In the paintings and prints, I used both the literal and metaphorical qualities of snow to communicate my personal experience of bereavement. In particular, I latched onto the way that things are hidden by snow, overlaying a haze of snow on top of figurative paintings to the point where they were almost abstract, progressively cutting away a lino block until the image disappeared, and layering snow in a screen print. Key artistic influences were melancholy landscapes by George Shaw, the layered visions of derelict Modernist buildings by Alex Hartley and painters of snow such as Norwegian Ornulf Ophdahl.
Snow
Snow fell soft and lay upon the ground
in dead of night, a wintry miracle.
It covered earth and muffled every sound.
At break of day the air was clear, icebound,
nothing moved – pristine and beautiful.
Snow was soft and lay upon the ground.
Trees had arms of ermine, houses crowned
with shining silver, transformational.
Snow covered earth and muffled every sound.
Breathing gulps of arctic air we found
a frozen landscape, hard as metal.
Snow was soft and lay upon the ground.
When the snow melted, my world unwound.
After such bright light, darkness was cruel.
White turned to grey, rain the only sound.
Now every year, when winter comes around,
I think of that cold January still –
snow fell soft and lay upon the ground,
it covered earth and muffled every sound.
Ornulf Opdahl, Mountain & Sea (Cathedral), 2015-16
Alex Hartley, Ohra North East Elevation, 2016
Gone, lino-cuts, 41 x 35 cm
Poetry and other writing became an important part of my practice. I started a poetry course and became an aficionado of grief memoirs such as Marion Coutts’ The Iceberg, Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Michel Faber’s collection of poems Undying: a Love Story. In my own writing I used traditional poetic forms such as sonnets and villanelles to give voice to sorrow and loss and uncover layers of meaning. Aristotle’s notion of catharsis as a function of art (from his Poetics) was also important for my Snow pieces. In her essay ‘The Work of Research’ in What is Research in the Visual Arts: Obsession, Archive, Encounter (ed.s Holly and Smith) Joanne Morra touches on catharsis in art when she says 'remembering of repressed material involves a relocation of something from the unconscious, or the past, to the conscious, or the present.' For the French writer Georges Perec this coming together of past and present represents an 'opening', for Tacita Dean – who has remained an important reference point – it is a 'state of grace'.
George Shaw, Study for Hanging Around (Landscape without Figures), 2014
Key developments ​
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Writing poetry as part of my artistic process
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Print-making