Grey Wall
What if the 'everyday' looked back at us? How would we feel? That once passive dependency, that aesthetic justification, staring right back at us, through us. Would we become the everyday in turn, recede into the background, waiting to be attended to by another artist? Thing is, it is almost a tautology to theorise about art in terms of the everyday. Art is the everyday, it has just been rearranged in colour, form and narrative to make it less unnoticeable. The worst fear for the artist is that the grey wall of the everyday hasn't been transformed enough, grey brick by grey brick. For the last two weeks -- screen-printing the artist Emma Roche's preparatory drawings -- I have been meeting the gaze of the everyday head on, day in and day out. Working in zine-scale (A4++) and large-scale (200×150cm) I have gotten to feel Emma's work (better than my words could ever know) from the ground up via her graph-paper pencil drawings which she generously sent originals by post. Devoid of colour and physicality in respect to her knitted acrylic and oil paintings, but filled with studio noise and notation, they are the literal building blocks of the everyday. They have an altogether different mood to the artist's paintings, from her soulful She-Wolf to soulless Darth Vader in their frieze-like profiles and Seurat hum. They are fugitive drawings that think painting but don't do painting. They are the architecture, the archetypes, the sad viaducts and empty vestibules of her Autumn studio, waiting for physical and chroma consolation, things to be leafed through, wither, recede. If Emma's painting can be analogised with the 8-bit Atari game DIG DUG pulsing beneath the wooly throw upon the couch before the warm fire, Emma's drawings are out in the cold of everyday essence, receding beyond the fold of attention. The silkscreen versions are even more pared back, reusing the routine, rigid and repetitive graph pattern to emphasise the everyday from which they are borne and born. They are, in essence, the dust mite's memory of the physical painting. They are the grey wall which art aspires to.
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