From the Studio Spinnerei, Leipzig
Exhibition dates: Wed 3 to Sat 20 October, 2007
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Time for Observation
by Anna-Louise Kratzsch (Master of Arts in History of Art, Curator. Director of the Leipzig International Art Program)
Entering Shonah Trescott’s studio I feel the privateness of her space.
“Is it difficult to expose yourself so intimately?”
“No”, she replies. Then she pauses. “Actually, sometimes yes.”
We are having tea near her personal corner, a small table, a bed, some newspaper articles on the wall and a painting, modest grey, a flower still life.
We sit and talk. Shonah needs time. Time for observation. I agree with her. It’s time to slow down. The ability to observe, once an artist’s distinction, has long been abandoned. Today, artists repeat what sells, it is the age of rapid repetition, the production line for the hungry art market. Shonah intends to create awareness instead. She documents.
Her painting process is a question of time. As Paul Virilio argues, speed is a form of violence. Adjourning speed means pausing a violent act.Suspending speed for observation results in quality not quantity.
I look around. Oil paints, brushes, her GDR curtains in the background of a painting, fruits, skulls and bottles on her table, as well as fishes ‘slipping’ on canvases which lean against the wall. Shonah calls them Sunday paintings. They are weekend observations, responses to her surroundings. “I am like a sponge. I feel different things and record them.”
Another day
Shonah returns from a jog through the park. She tells me about the calm morning, the shallow sun in the tree crowns and the river waveless. I am surprised, looking around in her studio. “Where are your landscape paintings, the big formats. You remember?”
“Sure, they are behind the still lifes.”
It was a dry reply. “Try again, just from another angle”, she adds later. Her paintings are constant reconsiderations. Shonah takes the time to destroy her images. She produces, constructs, and destroys.
“Sometimes, a painting suggests wrecking it. I couldn’t repeat what I have done on a small scale. There had to be something that goes further.” She models chairs, oilcans and apples. These objects of daily use become sculptural.
I get lost in a red squared shape. Suddenly the eye composes a red chair, the one I had just been sitting on. Then, from a distance, her still lives dissolve in city silhouettes. They go further, start to be independent. The painter mixes different codes. Insides are turned into outsides by dissolving stubborn perspectives. A simple white line becomes a horizon. A still life becomes landscape.
Growing up in regional Australia, she reacts naturally to the landscape. She evokes churches and cranes, blue and grey skies, bridges and pathways. It is her art of contemplation. Landscapes are scattered around her studio table which is occupied by onions, wild apples from the nearby canal, and oilcan and animal dentures. Beer, red wine, champagne and water bottles; sketches as well as her German course book. Pastels lie on a little table on the ground; ‘The Art of Anatomy: a visualisation of the body during the last five centuries”, a great book. Old dirty rubber tiles from a deserted railway track in Plagwitz are covered in paint and stuck on the wall, beneath a little rose painting and a nail box.
Underneath a brown shirt hanging in the window, there are paste-like colours floating on landscape postcards which lie on top of heaters. They are turned off because it is summer. More postcard paintings rest on self-made shelving and line the window sills. On the ground many more postcard are sealed and ready for painting. They were once invitation cards from her last exhibition in Mallorca, she recycles them as painting backgrounds. A black and white photograph of her language school where she took German classes also becomes a surface to paint on. The people in the foreground disappear, thick colours cover them. Only the sharp church tower is left visible.
She does not fear mechanical reproductions. Nothing gets thrown away. She loves vintage and the textures of used things. They turn into Shonah’s archive of personal things, into her field of observation. It is a process executed both in and outside.
