Do You Keep Thinking There Must Be Another Way?
- Submitting institution
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Royal College of Art(The)
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- Talbot1
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
- Various including Gemeentemuseum Den Haag/Dundee Contemporary Arts/Tate St Ives
- Brief description of type
- Multi-component output with contextual information
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
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- Year
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- Talbot’s sustained investigation into the conceptual and material properties of silk as a support for painting took over five years. The growing understanding of the potential of this fabric is clearly demonstrated in the ambition of the artworks, culminating in large-scale installed work that could only be arrived at through a lengthy studio and intellectual enquiry. Given the research’s interest in the work’s communicative properties, the work has been ‘tested’ in numerous exhibitions. Together these form an in-depth, experimental approach that moves from simple hanging works to more evolved structures that anticipate their audiences’ physical interactions.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This body of work developed conceptually and technically over four years, 2016-2020. It extends the means by which contemporary painting might operate: simultaneously expanding strategies for presentation and installation (hanging free of stretchers, double sided, walk-through structures) with strategies for image-making using composites of text, drawn image and pattern to articulate internal narratives and lived experience.
The research focuses on finding material forms that develop concerns around how the intimate can become material for artwork. As explored in my published essay, ‘Coming to Painting’ (Journal of Contemporary Painting, 2017) it takes the principles of écriture féminine (Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray), and its proposal that new languages (other than the dominant, patriarchal one) can be developed to articulate life experience, particularly from a feminine perspective. It then aligns this with contemporary painting, setting in motion conceptual relations between painting-thinking-speaking.
I aimed to reset the rules of traditional processes, testing both the making and the installation extensively. Of course fabric works are not new to contemporary painting (Miriam Shapiro, Tracey Emin, Jacqui Hallam etc), but through the use of multiple, drawn images, diaristic writing, quotation and pattern in my work, I began to develop an idiosyncratic visual language that led to the rejection of painting’s ‘givens’ (stretcher format/flat work/wall-mounted installation). Silk’s lightness is equivalent to the immediacy of work on paper and allowed me to explore notions of intimacy, femininity and the domestic, appropriate to my subject matter.
The works have been disseminated in eleven solo and eleven group exhibitions in both public and commercial galleries in the UK and Europe, including Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Dundee Contemporary Arts and Tate St Ives. I received the Max Mara Prize 2020 for this work, as well as an invitation to exhibit in a solo show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2022.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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