falling into place catalogue (e version)

7/28/2019 Falling into Place Catalogue (e Version)

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FALLING INTO PLACECATALOGUE

LYNNE CAMERON


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FALLING INTO PLACE

An exhibition of paintings by Lynne Cameron

University of Leeds Clothworkers Hall Foyer

2 August 30 October 2013

www.lynnecameron.com

Lynne CameronArtwork photographs by Graham Low, LRPS


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INTRODUCTION

This is the story of the exhibition Falling into Place - of how it came to be and what it

means to me.

I have been painting and drawing since 1996. In 2000 I was accepted on a Foundationcourse, but the time was not right - two teenage sons and a mortgage demanded myattention. I continued to paint in my kitchen, attended evening classes at York College andLeeds College of Art, and summer courses at the Slade School of Art in London.

My day job during these years was university teaching. I worked at the University of Leeds,becoming a professor in 2003, and moved to the Open University in 2006. My research -

into metaphor and how people use it - gradually took over from teaching, and from 2009-2012 I was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to investigatemetaphor and empathy in contexts of violence and conict. This is the work that took me

to Kenya. In the vast landscapes of the northern Rift Valley, we found successful conicttransformation activities, inspiring leadership, and empathy between people returning afterthe dehumanising effects of conict. The short visit was full of images and emotions. When,in 2012, I decided the time had come to give my art a chance to ourish, it was inevitable

that it would connect with my artwork.

I moved to London, shifted to part-time working, and found a studio to paint in. Fallinginto Place fell into place.

In this exhibition catalogue, I show how the paintings developed through various stages ofwork, from the initial small representational paintings to the larger abstracts. At each stage,different inuences came into play and different connections resonated between the visualand the experiential.


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THANKS

My art is about space and how we occupy it. Space is nothing until something is put into

it; occupied space becomes place. Our bodies, memories, and emotions are created by theplaces and spaces we move through, creating landscapes of memory that in turn hold ourremembered emotions. I want my paintings to express these overlapping, fragmented anddynamic landscapes.

The natural world provides underlying structures for my paintings. In Kenya, the structures derivefrom the lines of paths through the bush, the shape of a young mans arms held tense as hespeaks of friends killed in conict, the angles of tree branches. Over these structures I layercolour and texture, each new gesture responding to what is already in place.

In this exhibition my artwork is in conversation with my academic research into conicttransformation and empathy. Both aspects of my work come from noticing and attending tothe specic. As Paul Klee said, I must begin, not with hypotheses, but with specic instances, nomatter how minute.

to Philip Spellacy, Jillian Johnson and the University of Leeds School of Music , for the opportunity

to Katia and Lorna, for the studio and all that has meant

to ESRC, for funding the research and supporting the exhibition

to CREET at the Open University, for funding this publication

to Evans Onyiego and the Catholic Diocese of Maralal Peacebuild- ing Team, Samburu County,Kenya, and to Simon Weatherbed of Responding to Conict, for allowing me the privilege ofwitnessing your work

ARTISTS STATEMENT


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IMMEDIATE

MEMORIESOn my return from Kenya in March 2012, I needed topaint. In my cottage kitchen I surrounded myself withphotographs, mixed the colours I had seen in Maralal andproduced a set of small paintings.


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TREES IN A

LANDSCAPE

Over there

acrylic on paper 30 x 40 cm

The Spaceacrylic on card 22 x 30 cm


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The space of east Africa challenges my eyes and my mind. It has its own scale.

And over it, the sky.

It seemed the most peaceful place on earth. Until we heard the stories of violence andsaw the photographs.

The trees grow alone or in small groups. The trees and bushes have long, sharp thorns. Theextreme heat and dryness of this area seem to bleach the colours of soil and plants.The mountains were far away on the other side of the Rift Valley. At the edge, the valleydrops deeply and sharply.

We listened to stories of the conict between the Pokot communities who live mainlydown in the valley, the Samburu communities who live on the plains at the top, and theTurkana from further north. And of how the conict was being transformed. A new welland waterpump had been built, changing the possibilities of the landscape for living in.People were eager to start again, in a new place.

I interviewed a woman in the town. She was around my age and was trying to changewomens ideas so they would not praise the young men for ghting and killing but forworking for peace. At the end of the inter view, she went off to catch her bus, stridingdown the dusty street. When the bus reached its last stopping point, she would have manykilometers to walk further through the valley to get to her community. She had strong legsand large feet; she walked with energy, and because walking through the landscape waswhat people do.

They know the landscape from lives spent walking through it.

Cattle raiding would happen at night, on foot. Young men would walk with their guns toattack a village, and then take the cattle away with them, across the landscape.

Pokot children from the valley walk up to the school each week to live with the Samburuchildren in the Peace Dormitory. Samburu people from the plains walk down to the PeaceMarket to trade with Pokot families.


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THE HEAT

The Heat of the Sky

acrylic on paper 22 x 30 cm

The Heat of the Dayacrylic on paper 22 x 30 cm


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Intrigued by the shape of the acacia trees against the sky, I worked on their distinctive

angles, the spaces between branches. Painting the land and the sky became more aboutfeeling than representation.

In the top painting I was playing with the paint left on my palette - mainly the orangeycadmium red, with some yellow ochre and blues. I liked the way it gave a sense of the heat

that beats down from the sky.

A pair of paintings of war memories by James Boswell in the Tate Britain, one with a redsky and one with red land, inspired me to another painting in which the land was red and

the sky with ochre mixed into the red. Now it was about the heat that the land pushesback at people in the landscape.

Empathy concerns how we understand another person. I have always been fascinated bythe gap of otherness between ourselves and other people, and how we try to bridge itwith language. Although we are doomed never to fully understand other people, somehowwe can make enough sense of the other to manage our lives as social beings.

Violence and conict become possible when empathy is denied and the other is renderedless than human.

When violence ceases, empathy must struggle to return, as the other comes to beseen no longer as an enemy but as a fellow human being with full human rights. Conict

transformation practitioners support the return of empathy.


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THE FENCE

Farming again

acrylic on card 22 x 30 cm

Trees and Fenceacrylic on paper 22 x 30 cm


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The trees provide materials for fencing, and fences create boundaries, security, protection.

Fences mark land as belonging to a family or a community.

Fences keep the livestock out of newly planted crops and in the safety of the homesteadat night.

In Farming again the fence was an indicator of peace. For the rst time for several years,fear of violence had not sent people away from this place. They felt secure enough to stayand to dig the land in preparation for the rains and planting food crops. The fence showed

that they could imagine a future where cattle needed to be kept away from growingplants.


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COLOUR

PAINTINGS

Immerse yourself in the visual!

This was advice I was given at a painting summer schoolin 2012.

I was still painting Kenya, my responses to stories ofviolence and conict transformed to peace. The tutorsuggested I start from the colours of the cloths worn by

the young Samburu leader.

I began to play with colour.


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We had driven some hours to the village and beyond it to the homestead - several hutsinside a large fence. We sat outside the fence under a tree, on grass and goat droppings.The young men had come back from the camp where they had gone to ee the violence.They had dressed in their best for the occasion, with pink and red cloths, colourfulnecklaces and bangles, and mobile phones.

They agreed to par ticipate in the research, signed the consent forms, and dismissed anyrequirement of anonymity. They wanted to tell us, and the world, about the ghting in theircommunities and how it was now being stopped. As usual, I held the digital recorder tocatch their words, turning it to our guide when he was translating questions or answers.

My mind was buzzing with the sights and sounds all around, and it was pushing those away

to focus on what the young men were saying. One response stopped me in my tracks andchanged everything:

the work of peace is not that easy ..it is the most difcult workwhen we started this war,we started something that we never knew,and that we have never seen

in that war so many friends,so many young people,died ...so many people died in this war

As the words were translated, I looked at the young man speaking. He was in his mid-twenties, I guessed. Around the same age as my own sons. That was the moment ofempathy that sent my objectivity scuttling across the plain. I shifted from being a researcherinto being a mother of sons, allowing in the emotions of horror and sadness that came

with the thought of young men killing and being killed.

In starting from the colours of the young mans cloths, I was also starting from this place ofempathy.


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PATH Sometimes my paintings star t behind my eyes. If I close my eyes and look at the inside ofmy eyelids, I see colours and shapes that I want to place on a canvas.

Some months after the summer school, I saw there the bright pink and orangey-red nextto each other, surrounded by dark. The image echoed the photograph of the young manbut used the vocabulary of paint, and what paint might do.

The left-hand painting has something of the shape of the cloth as worn; that was not tostay as the paintings moved on. The clashing combination of the bright colour s pleasedme and was kept as a place of optimism in the later abstract paintings and developed as acolour theme.

I placed other colours from the Kenyan landscape - ochre and pale green - alongside,scratching and scraping to recreate the feeling of harshness, the difcult emotions.

Left: Where to start fromacrylic on canvas panel 18 x 24 cm

Middle: Moving out

acrylic on canvas panel 25 x 30 cm

Right: Outwardacrylic on canvas panel 25 x 30 cm


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MOVING The colour paintings showed me a way forward and offered a language for bigger works:colours, a key shape and its placing, painted lines, scratched lines, and their movementacross the landscape of the painting.

I now had a feeling of what I wanted to say and the means to say it.

I switched to canvas, learning how to stretch canvas on to wooden frames, and prime it

ready for the paint. I tried with oils and returned to acrylics which better suit the dynamicsof my painting practice.

Places of Changeacrylic on canvas 30 x 40 cm


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LANSCAPES OF

POSSIBILITY

A set of abstract paintings that play with the colours, linesand angles of my Kenyan experience.


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FALLING INTO

PLACE

Fluorescent pink and orange paint add a contemporary brightness to the palette, echoingthe inltration of high tech materials and mobiles into traditional lifestyles.

Glimpses of horizons are offered, sometimes through collage of photocopied, more rep-resentational paintings and sometimes through impasto lines.

Paths scratched into the paint cross the landscapes.

There are places that feel more comfortable and places that are more edgy and harsh.

Left: Falling into placeacrylic , collage on canvas 51 x 61 cm

Right: Landscapes of Possibility 1acrylic on canvas 60 x 80 cm


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LANDSCAPES OF

POSSIBILITY 2 - 6

acrylic on canvas / linen 60 x 80 cm

In these paintings, I play more withlayering and colour, exploiting thepossibilities of the paint. Strong gesturesare contrasted with smaller lines; thin

translucence with thick opacity.

Through the processes of explorationnarrated here, I have been led moredeeply into my painting practice. Throughmy paintings, I hope to make more vivid

the possibilities of conict transformationthat we saw put into action by the

Kenyan peacebuilders.


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FALLING INTO PLACE

Lynne Cameron

ww.lynnecameron.com

DesignedbyPau

lWootton-www.graphicnet.co.u

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