DEGREES UNEDITED

The penultimate year of part-time study is immanent and this ex carpet designer plans to paint and scale her way through dissertation research. Richard Taylor finds out how before the summer draws to a close.

No place for designer habits, onwards instead to the honesty of painterly progression

In 1981 Marion completed a two-year Art Foundation course at Croydon College. She then moved onto a four year Carpet and Textile Design course in the midlands, producing large painted and varnished canvas floor cloths. Her dissertation was on British Design in the 1950's and the influence of technological development: she then went on to work in London, Belgium and France designing carpets for manufacturers and interior design companies.

After a career break to raise three children she took a painting workshop at Amersham College, and threw herself back into researching artists to explore her own visual language. Marion now looks at the second dissertation of her academic career, for completion by early 2011 at Buckinghamshire New University. Graduation then comes in 2012.

"The subject of my work is place filled with experience, abstract space and colour sensation. During the first level of my course I worked in collage overloaded in abstract imagery. Then, in one project we produced the work of someone with a different identity..."
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Another quote

"A place is more than an area. A place surrounds something. A place is the extension or the consequence of an action. The painter is continually trying to discover, to stumble upon, the place, which will contain and surround his present act of painting. Ideally there should be as many places as paintings. The trouble is that a painting often fails to become a place. When it fails to become a place, a painting remains a representation or a decoration - a furnishing." [1]

A place for painterly conversation

Richard Taylor: How is it that you deal with scale - carpets are big, so how is it that you can bring yourself to work smaller in size? Does this have anything to do with changing your character as an artist, enabling you to deal with different things?

Marion Piper: Certainly many things are changing and I have loosened in my approach. Before, as a carpet designer I was used to responding to a client's brief, with line and colour etc. Now, it's just me in the studio with my ideas and imagery: through using paint within a broader sense of application I am finding new terms of expression.

I have thought a lot about scale. My work begins within sketchbooks; I carry an A6 book everywhere, for notes and sketches of details or ideas and work with A5 concertina books and A3 books. What I am trying to reach is something that's as large or small as it so happens to be. Scale, then is not fixed but fluid and perhaps the carpet experience has helped in dealing with these shifts, as the design work was always smaller than the finished material: a small tuft of yarn became an expansive background colour.

RT: How do you see the remaining years of your degree panning out: will you stick with painting specifically, or do you see other materials having a place in what you do?

MP: I will be completing the final level of my course in two part-time academic years, and the approaching semester will be devoted to the dissertation. This leaves the remaining three semesters for studio practice alone. However I am currently working in my sketchbooks and plan to paint throughout the research and writing time.

I feel I have only just started to explore oil paint and pigment: the physicality of mixing colour, glaze and capturing the glow by hand and eye is very immediate and informing. The sketchbook dimensions offer this flexibility too. They can be sequenced in a number of ways, held and viewed, or wall mounted.

I feel liberated to explore ideas without a predetermined format, there's a sense of fluidity - its very relevant.

RT: Do you feel your paintings photograph well as colour fields - what place does photography have and how does documenting your practice deal with scale?

MP: I document my work with photography to record decision-making and to keep visual notes of things I like, which may get lost during the layering or reducing process.

However I find that my paintings don't photograph all too well as finished pieces, along with colour nuances the experience of movement is lost. The experience of the painter and viewer has come together for me recently in a way that I had not anticipated in the studio. I discovered in the gallery that the subtleties of these shifts and changes cause the viewer to slow down, images emerge gradually, creating stillness. The colours pulsate through each other and change with the light and viewing angle. The short, 'one take' virtual tour on my blog is a better visual record than the photographs.

Photographic images themselves seem to me to be to be too distant, somehow removed, compressing the image data, depth and time. I want to continuity and fluidity in my work, in a directly honest and open way.

RT: Do you find it difficult to be honest with yourself whilst being honest in your work?

MP: I think the intimacy of the sketchbooks has enabled me to be more honest: deliberately not analysing what I am doing as I work more instinctively.

Hew Locke, a visiting tutor, talked recently about working with instinct; 'We know deep down what is best for our work.' He spoke about being confident with aspects of what makes a work what it is. Before using sketchbooks without being self-conscious, I was blocked by working everything out in advance. I don't think I trusted my instinct. Being honest with myself about taking risks definitely helps. This makes the work honest with itself about how it's made: leaving evidence of mark making renders the painting process truthful.

RT: I am interested in how your paintings translate through movement image: do you think elements of performance might begin to creep in - building from sketchbook to canvas with you in between?

MP: There are recurring thoughts I am having about a classic cartoon scenario: a character runs through the landscape, stops and creates a door with a dripping brush, then opens it and goes through into another place.

I have been aware of a growing sense of 'performance'. The drawing, sketchbook work and preparation are like plot development, rehearsals and set building. The painting process then begins and has an altogether different rhythm to it.

RT: I would be reminded of Guillermo del Toro's 'Pan's Labyrinth' or something of a rabbit burrow through to another world. It's interesting how preparation, through sketchbook work, can act as another form of presentation. You then move on to painting as more of a characterising act. Are they more of an environment for exploration do you think? A place for the character to get lost...

MP: Discovering an abstract and exceptional place fascinates me: acts of re-imagining place and time and purpose, releasing a character to intuit freely with form and emotion - they're all ways to open up of possibilities.

I titled my recent series of paintings 'New Land', a play on words linked to the literal location of source material. For this project, the rigid formalities of brutalist architectural environments evoke a sense of light and movement, colour and rhythm. And in a way the sketchbooks are exploratory travel journals, documenting this multi-faceted experience. I recall specific moments and places when I know that these elements have come together. These are my starting points, I can hold onto them and I think about them often. This is what I am aiming for in the paintings I think, to define and convey that moment of unity.

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[1] (John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket, Studio Talk for Miquel Barcelo, 2001 Bloomsbury Publishing, London)

First published: a-n.co.uk July 2010