Everything Happens

‘Everything happens’, that’s the thing.

The title of the show is from the French tout arrive, used by Manet as a letterhead, which in colloquial use conveys the idea:‘ I didn’t think it possible!’ For me it suggests how by keeping the work moving on in the ordinariness of daily practice -repeated negotiation between what I want and what the work wants -the extraordinary c n happen.

Taken another way, ‘everything happens’ could mean that there is nothing, only events: whatever is, is an occurrence. And indeed, my work evolves in a fluid, self-responsive way, where events, or singularities, occur within an indeterminate, mutable space.

I work into the surface of the painting by mono-printing (using large expanses of plastic sheeting),then by dragging paint, scoring and drawing. Absence sometimes intervenes, as when the gesture reacts to an image present only through projection, or a “non-mark” appears as masking is stripped away. I look for potentials or resistances between the marks deliberately placed and those that arise unpredicted. My response to what I arrive at –or what arrives – changes from moment to moment. The excitement is in the possibility.

The work builds up as a palimpsest, if you like, a series of layers in which the earlier survive as ghosts; yet earlier elements also survive, co-present, on the topmost surface -some re-arriving there through the sanding off of later paint. This complex history is both continued and inflected in the succeeding layer. I look for what lies between; latency or tension between surface and potential space. More especially in spaces between layers or marks, the space between passages of paint, or the space where paper or canvas is left unmarked.

“While we are perceiving a phenomenon we believe we see it, yet we do not see its perpetual transformation.” Georges Vantongerloo

The works on paper run parallel to the paintings. The paper I use is delicate, and unlike the paintings, once mark is down that’s pretty much it, so the mark has to be at its most essential. Again I begin with mono-print –the ink being transferred in characteristic patterns by running hairbrush lightly across the back of the paper – which I respond to, often some time later, with charcoal. In some drawings I use the charcoal response to compress the space, and the visible paper becomes the active component. Each mark contains the energy of the moment in which it was made. The unmarked areas create an ambiguity of spatial relationship.

The works on both paper and canvas are exploratory and open ended, inhabiting a place between what is thought and what has been experienced, evoking perhaps the inner psychological space of the unthought known.

Kate Palmer © 2004