Drawn to Paint: Materiality and Transcendence in the work of Kathy Barry

Jan Verwoert and others argue for grounding criticality in materiality and process. In his ontology of painting, Verwoert uses the term ‘emergence’, by which he means its structure, derived at through a slow, searching process of becoming. The emergent property (water’s wetness for example) cannot be deduced by examining the individual elements (hydrogen and oxygen bonds) and so the finished (art)work represents an unanticipated outcome that only reveals itself once the work is done. ‘Emergence’ describes a condition under which something arises out of crisis, moments when a decision is required. In a critical environment where painting no longer enjoys implicit justification and its discrete taxonomies have been dissolved, the artist sets up criteria, rules to guide the process and to facilitate a state of receptivity and self-reflection, rejecting blanket solutions in favour of contingent decisions.

Barry’s work expresses this in emergent, it(in)errant, fractal folds, her original ascetic criteria becoming increasingly complex and deconstructed as the materials and composition assert their own logic. Both her graphite and watercolour drawings express folding and unfolding in the Deleuzian sense – a sense of iterant accumulation, of contiguous movement.

I recently have been looking into Jan Vanwoerts writing on emergence, and Kathy Barry's review was the perfect way to decribe the process of emergence in my paintings. It deals with the idea of of “becoming, and this becoming is in a constant state of flux. I see it is part of our human condition to adapt to this continuous change. In reference to Ranciere’s writing The Emancipated Spectator, a viewer becomes an active participant as opposed to passive voyeur. It is only through this encounter that we begin to realize that a work can be independent and all the viewer needs is what lies before them not what is added through interpretation. This exhibition will reflect upon how the process of materiality in painting can form an emergence through transitions, transformations and optical shifts. this can occur in both making and viewing.

In My painting practice i see emergence as a painting unfolds through its materiality, this is where 'painting happens.' Painting ‘happens’ is a quotation by Sigma Polke.  I want to highlight the process based around the contingency of materials and how they reveal a sensation both in making and viewing, through this happening which occurs in my painting. I see it as an artistic perspective both imagined and experienced. As Polke puts it, “this ‘happens’ not when you try really hard, but in the moment when you let go. Things can fall into place in a way that you couldn’t have conceived before” (1960).  It is through this moment that it becomes an exploration of materials; and how they operate through layers in making and when exposed to light there detail becomes something other than what it was before.