Source work:
0806/85
Roger Fry (1866-1934)
Still Life with Omega Flowers
1919
Oil on canvas
Polyphony - Jeanette Gilks
Jeanette Gilks (b.1953)
Polyphony
Fibre art: paper, cotton, fabric
R6 250
When I saw Roger Fry's painting of origami flowers I was reminded of Cut Flowers, a still life fabric and paper collage I did in 1994. I decided there and then that I would make an artwork that explored the idea of different kinds of paper flowers, indeed all the different 'melodies' of paper flowers! Painted flowers and flower paintings end up as paper flowers if they are reproduced in a book. Books turn images and the medium in which they have been made into paper. Even a photographed flower - possibly the closest rendering of the real flower you can get - has been papered twice: first it is the original photographic paper flower, thereafter it can be reproduced ad infinitum in books.
As I proceeded with this idea, other melodies or voices about flowers and still life as a painting genre began to germinate. There were the loud, powerful voices of the still life artists themselves, as expressed through reproductions of their artworks. Why not appropriate parts of their work directly and weave them together to create a new harmony? I had a vision of one of Nesta Nala's clay pots in a 'cupboard' created on the wall above one of Cecil Skotnes's tables... Perhaps Alan Crump and Raoul Dufy, thanks to Patrick Caulfield, a contemporary English painter, could play alongside Francisco de Zurbaran, a 17th century Spanish still life artist.1 Context generates meaning and new meanings emerge from altered contexts. Here could be an opportunity to re-view familiar artworks. Other artists could be indirectly evoked: 'I am not a flower', recalls Rene Magritte's iconic, The Treachery of Images.
My book also illustrates some of the styles and conventions of representation from expressionism and photographic realism to the biological diagrams that often accompany scientific and dictionary definitions. Possibly another minor melody is consequently the relationship between the image and the text. (How the final meaning of the image manages to just escape the trawling net of words, however, waits in the wings for another performance!)
I have always been fascinated how recent printing technology such as photocopying or Photoshop's digital manipulations of images transforms meaning. Despite - or because of - the massive duplication of images, the allure of the original artwork only seems to increase. Despite my irreverent treatment of Fry's work by presenting it in odd colours, upside down or rubbing it away to make room for my own defacing scratchings, the original work in the Tatham Art Gallery remains poised and aloof from it all. Does it care, I wonder, that so many of its progeny have run amok?
The Omega workshops of the Bloomsbury group, of which Roger Fry was a member, included workshops on interior design. I have therefore made it possible for the book to zigzag out and assume the Omega shape in the manner of a series of room dividers. The melody between books, high 'fine' art, craft and interior design is thus also explored. I think other discourses include the old but always hot debate between what constitutes real as opposed to illusion or imitation. Are the three dimensional origami flowers real or not?
Apart from theoretical considerations though, the book is also designed to connect us to our childhood, or the child-still-in-us. Peeping under flaps and through holes, and opening secret doors recalls the touchy feely hide-and-seek enchantments of the pop-up books we read when we were very young. I hope the book will be enjoyed intuitively and visually by everyone, independent of any conceptual theory.
I invite you to find your own tune to hum...
1. The National Gallery in London staged an exhibition called Encounters: New Art from Old in 2000. Patrick Caulfield painted Hemingway never ate here in response to Francisco de Zurbaran's A Cup of Water and a Rose on a Silver Plate (1630).