Résumé

Géraldine Swatridge on 'Résumé'

My work usually addresses the psychological levels of internal life, incorporating subjects such as insomnia, illness, mental illness, grieving, reflection on the human condition and our preoccupations and exploring the ways human beings deal with these experiences. In the past my work has focused on schizophrenia, investigating various aspects of the condition by deconstructing images of cold, still, deserted and atmospheric landscapes through progressive abstraction. This gradual deconstruction through abstraction is a recurrent thought process in my work.

My practice expresses my thoughts and research through the media of painting, mixed media and printing and is usually a mixture of preplanned preparations and intuitive actions.

In December 2019, a virus appeared in China and quickly spread to Europe. The first lockdown in the UK started in March 2020, and this pattern became the new norm imposed by Covid-19 on the entire world.

I went to my studio cupboard and took out a handmade book with Khadi paper, picked up my watercolour paints and started to respond to the situation. I initially worked quite impulsively, a bit like automatic writing during the Surrealist era, a technique I like particularly because it allows ideas of imagery and words to flow freely.

The book took me to a space of expression on the consequences of Covid-19, on personal lives as well as on economic outcomes. These thoughts were usually fed by reading the news or listening to the radio. There was and still is a sort of contradiction between blunt statistics, sheer facts, numbers (describing elements of human life during the pandemic), numbers of deaths, the state of the economy, changes in behaviour, the loss of the known, the routine, the reassuring and the organic, the nature of a virus (that is organic), blobs of colours, patterns. The virus is part of life, and life isn't always about beauty and miracles, it is also about destroying, colonisation of cells, invasion.

To illustrate that contradiction I chose watercolour, which is organic and difficult to control due to its nature; its flow depends on the amount of water used, the amount of pigment in the paint, the quality of the paint, the choice of colour, the tilting of the page where the water will flow.

The words are cold facts heard every day of our lives from now on, about the changes, the losses, the restrictions.

I found that mark making was a way of encapsulating the inevitable regain of control we all need over the situation, our life and our mental health by adding a bit more direction to the painting. Mark making is often automatic by nature, repetitive, applied instinctively and adapting gracefully to any changes on the paper, changes of colours and shapes, tones and values.

Eventually, I made 40 individual works on the subject, from which these six are an extract. They are pages 14, 23, 27, 33, 36, and 38.

Géraldine Swatridge