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Life RaftsandEscape Hatches
MargaretMellis &HayleyTompkins
Edinburgh City Art Centre
Rhona Warwick Paterson
Margaret Mellis, White Painting (with Red, Blue, Violet and Ochre), 1964
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
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Margaret Mellis, Sea, 1991. Edinburgh City Art Centre
In the stores of Edinburgh’s City Art Centre (as in most museum stores) the
experience of looking at art becomes as an oddly intimate one. Lighting is
low, there is no superfluous noise save for the hum of a humidifying system
and the slow mechanical yawn of paintings being pulled in and out on giant
racks. Conversation with the curator is often a quiet and concise commentary
of the work under scrutiny, either on technique or providing a historical
context. Sporadically (usually following a long silence) little expressions of joy
are registered physically; a forward lurch as if something new has only now
presented itself on the surface of the painting, fingers cover a smiling mouth
and eyes half close to reveal a striped back tonality. Momentarily an artwork is
placed on the floor and in looking downwards, it is transformed into something
open - to be looked into rather than stepped back from. Uncoupled from its
previous identity as ‘a painting’ it becomes something reminiscent of an escape
hatch and offers, instead, a new proposition.
Sea (1991) is an assemblage relief consisting of found coloured shards of
boat lumber that splay out from a central form. Like a fragment of cobbled-
together life raft, it has a potent sense of urgency to it; nails are still visible, no
attempt has been made to make it beautiful, it is not measured, but it is also
far from slap-dash. While the forms themselves speak of a battered life history,
the colours that cling to the surface exude a hopeful quality in varying blues,
intense slivers of crimson, the odd scratch of white against the modulating hues
of driftwood. There is no obvious middle, symmetry or Golden Mean to its
design. However it exhibits a marked sophistication and deep understanding
of form and colour. What distinguishes this piece as both a compelling
contradiction and emblematic of its maker is that it lacks disguise; there appears
to be no historical pretext other than a tacit and joyful immersion in the
materials used.
Margaret Mellis (1914- 2009), the creator of this work, was a key figure in the
development of British Modernism, although arguably she has been sidelined in
historical accounts of that movement. Frequently portrayed as a satellite figure,
Mellis’s legacy has been primarily defined by her professional and geographical
proximities, rather than as an artist with a distinct and significant career.1
A
dominant historical narrative is that Mellis was pivotal in establishing the art
scene in St. Ives when she and her then husband, the author and critic Adrian
Stokes, moved there in 1939 to escape the threat to London at the outbreak
of war. Soon after their arrival there, they were joined by Ben Nicholson,
Barbara Hepworth, their young triplets, a cook and a nanny. As host, Mellis
subsequently relinquished her studio to make room for them, and soon after
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Naum Gabo and his wife also joined, forming the foundations of the British
Modernist movement. By turning ‘host’, as it were, Mellis appeared to be cast in
a marginalised position of ‘bystander’, or indeed, ‘wife of’ or ‘disciple of’. These
were to become the default historical and museological indicators for Mellis’s
role, but pertinently in recent appraisals of her life and career, the inverse has
in fact proved the more accurate portrayal - she was prolific, intensely reflexive,
experimental and her work defined by a material and intellectual rigour.2
In his recent and long overdue monograph on Mellis, Andrew Lambirth seeks
to redress the critical reading of her work, which successfully highlights the
sheer prolificacy and diversity of her practice. Yet, while he describes her work
beautifully, much of Lambirth’s analysis pivots on either her proximity to other
artists or her innate sensitivity to materials or intuitive approach to making.
This arguably gendered reading of Mellis’s oeuvre, where the impulses and
feelings in the production of her work and the passion and force behind the
improvisory nature of her ideas3
, infers that the disorderly appearance of the
later assemblage pieces were borne from whimsy and subjects of chance rather
than the rigour and experimentation that frequently describe the work of
her male peers. This is in no part an accusation of latent sexism by Lambirth
specifically, but rather brings to light a symptom of art historicism that still
struggles to articulate the work of women artists.
Back at the Edinburgh City Art Centre stores, what of Sea and the struggle to
articulate this work beyond Mellis’s personal proximity to Ben and Barbara?
Resigned into a disquieted silence, I am left to contemplate this work laid on
the floor (as Mellis would have initially conceived and assembled it). Viewing
it in this way, seeing the artists hand in the work and it’s poetic repurposing of
everyday detritus, I was brought not to the shores of Sussex in understanding
the career of Margaret Mellis but to a repurposed townhouse in Glasgow. This
downward-looking mode of viewing artwork resurfaces a memory of the work
that Hayley Tompkins made for the Venice Biennale in 2013 and shown again at
The Common Guild in Glasgow in 2014. Whilst the connections between these
two artists may initially seem tenuous, comparisons arise naturally and fall away
just as quickly. With an incomplete historical foundation to hang my discovery
of Mellis on, I chose to pursue a visual and material understanding of her work.
This text is a mapping together of that process; the prosaic documentation of
a career, observing how women artists are defined in public collections while
allowing for a reflexive resurfacing of the visual as viewed through a parallel
practice. Margaret Mellis, Brown Construction, 1941 (front and verso)
Glasgow Museums
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It began with a straight survey: sixteen works by Mellis across seven public
collections in Scotland. Six of those works were bought in the early 1990s from
the European Visual Arts Centre and the Redfern Gallery by Julian Spalding,
the then Director of Glasgow Museums. Margaret Gardiner, thepatron and
collector who bequeathed her enviable collection of British Modernist work
to The Pier Arts Centre, included four works in her bequest, two of which are
small oil paintings of expired anemone flowers from the late 1950s.4
The earliest work in Scotland’s collections is Construction in Wood (1940), in the
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Made during her St. Ives period, this
work was greatly admired by Gabo, Nicholson, Stokes, Hepworth and Herbert
Read. The incised forms and varying levels of low-relief in Construction in Wood
and Brown Construction, (both 1941) in the Glasgow Museums collection (in
storage) evidences her proficiency in the language of Modernism. It is her
rejection of purity in the finish of these works, where her process is left visible,
that elevates this work from the St. Ives period. The verso side of the latter
work (another intimacy indulged by the Museum store) reveals a glimpse of the
prosaic mapping of her practice. Mellis’ distinctive handwriting - a collision of
gestural loops and capitalisation - makes note of the title, medium, date and
size. Surrounding this are the idiosyncratic labelling of its exhibition history,
beginning with the definitive New Movements in Art show held at the London
Museum in 1942. That exhibition marked the distinct emergence of what we
now know to be British Modernism, and Mellis’s Brown Construction (now in
Glasgow Museums) was chosen for inclusion along with works by John Wells
and Peter Lanyon by Nicholson himself. Another label shows that Brown
Construction was also exhibited in Edinburgh at The New Street Gallery in
1982 and in the same year at The Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney. In
the centre of the back of the work, Mellis has painted a rough white square and
handwritten on top in pencil - date, title, dimensions – by which she brings
us closer in time to the origins of this relief than the cacophony of yellowing
museum labels.
Of the works on show in Glasgow Museums, three are somewhat tucked away
in the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery’s ‘Discovery Centre’ - the hands-on
area of the museum where two of Mellis’ driftwood constructions can be found
in a vitrine. Two Boats (1988-89), a concise marriage of form and colour, is, in
this context, somewhat let down by a literal interpretation drawing the visitor’s
attention to its key compositional elements: simply boats in water. However
in her own description of this work, Mellis explains in great detail the visual
‘double meanings’ she structured into this work:
[…] for instance, the large brown bit in which the blue shape sits, which was
the colour of a march pool was also boat-shaped. The puce above, from which
on another occasion I had scraped streaks of paint, and which reminded me
of a reed-bed, was sail shaped. The small brown bit of wood with red and
blue showing through activated the other colours and was also like a sail. The
narrow upright not only held the whole structure together, but it was a mast
which belonged to both boats. So I saw I had two boats sailing past each other
in opposite directions. The small sail could belong to the big brown boat
which was also in the water, and the big sail could belong to the small blue
boat sailing in the brown water. Everything fitted together in structure and
idea. When a few tangible shapes suggest a lot of intangible images I get great
satisfaction, like reading a good poem.5
The description of ‘tangible shapes’ informing ‘intangible images’ reveals a
conceptual and poetic impetus in her work that contradicts prior readings
as merely ‘instinctive’ and concerned only with formal relationships.6
Again
and again, Mellis in describing her own work refers to an interface between
the formal and the ‘intangible’ dimensions of her work, as an aspect that is
consistently overlooked. Emphasis instead is placed on her instinct as an artist,
reducing her oeuvre to a form of primativism or otherness embodied and
celebrated in the work of Alfred Wallis or Mary Jewels.
Margaret Mellis, Two Boats, 1988-89. Glasgow Museums
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Mellis was only fifteen when she enrolled at the Edinburgh College of Art
where she was taught by J. S. Peploe. She went on to study in Paris under Andre
Lhote and then worked in London with artists from the Euston Road School. As
a consequence, by the age of twenty-four Mellis was more highly educated than
the majority of her (male) peers and at the time well versed and knowledgeable
in the theoretical discourses on abstraction coming from Europe. Flowers are by
association a traditionally female subject matter, and the arrangement of flowers
was a skill taught to girls alongside the other domestic responsibilities such as
cooking and sewing. When Mellis returned to representational painting in the
late 1950s, we see that she has found her voice. Dead Anemones, Anemones Gone
to Seed, (both The Pier Art Centre) and Three Faded Flowers (Glasgow Museums)
are from a series of stark floral arrangements, consisting of contorted stems
and void spaces where petals should be. Of these Mellis is to have remarked
that dead flowers offered more interesting shapes than live flowers, and in
Lambirth’s monograph he offers the supposition that ‘she ordered her flat
shapes without reference to any possible emblematic content, but with a skill
that was born of the intuitive knowledge of the eye.’7
It is reasonable to suggest that because Mellis came of age during the Modernist
wave that she would and should be dismissive of subject matter or the symbolic
content of her work. The language of abstraction offered a freedom from
meanings that could evade any gender categorisation in her work in order to be
taken seriously. In a letter to Julian Spalding in 1987 she wrote: ‘I never think
of symbols or other irrelevant meanings. I just think what colour does to colour
and what shape does to shape.’8
Three years later Spalding acquired a large
group of Mellis’ works for Glasgow Museums, the majority of the pieces being
abstract.
In the 1970s Mellis choose to work on scraps of unprepared canvas. Burnt Out
(1975-6) in Glasgow Museums’ collection is a good example of the transition
from the geometric forms of Modernism to a more unconstrained and
immediate relationship with surface seen in the later assemblages. Working on
raw canvas served to underscore Mellis’ rejection of what a painting should look
and behave like, and instead it made evident her commitment to art-making
as a process of thinking and experimentation rather than a process which is
fixated on an end product. Accidents are permitted, perhaps even invoked, in
the search for the unchartered reverberations that happen between colours and
in the negated spaces of forms.
Margaret Mellis, Anemones Gone to Seed, c. 1957. The Pier Arts Centre, Orkney Margaret Mellis, Burnt Out, 1975-76. Glasgow Museums
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For Mellis it was the proximity to her materials that was for her the most
important relationship of all. She exhibited an innate distrust of the invisible,
the cultural networks, and the surfeit of ideas in art discourse that cannot be
seen. Disengagement, it should be stressed, was not the result of any lack of
intellectual rigour or esteem held for her with regard to her distinguished peer
group. Quite the opposite in fact; her theories on colour and structure earned
her much respect and she is cited as an influence on Francis Davison, Roger
Hilton, Peter Lanyon and, latterly, a young Damien Hirst, to name but a few.
From the cardboard collages of the 1940s to the assemblages of the 1990s, her
oeuvre cannot be easily categorised, and there is the sense that while this was
not engineered by Mellis, she actively resisted identification with a fixed place
or collective whether that place is geographical, within an art discourse, or to a
social/ professional network.
Published sources on Mellis often include documentation of her process; how
she found materials, what she collected and her laborious (re)arranging of the
driftwood assemblages on the floor of her studio prior to her nailing the work
together. Her studio practice was a constant process of decisions, which related
primarily to shape and colour, but also it was about the process of experiment
in and of itself. What Sea (1991) so vividly proposes is that there is much to
find in Mellis’ work in dialogue with contemporary practices, particularly those
such as the collages that resonate in aspects of process. For instance, materially,
there is an essence of ‘survivalism’ in the scavenged materials washed up, found
and ultimately used in a work such as Sea, which similar to Phyllida Barlow’s
process, reflected the realities of financing an art practice while raising a family.
There are mutual similarities in the ‘presentness’ of the work of Mellis and
Barlow respectively, including a raw or spontaneous aesthetic pursued by both
particularly in their later works. Yet, with Mellis, behind the material aspects
was an intensely poetic language that she pursued throughout her career and
it is there - beneath the surface - where her work resonates most pertinently
within a contemporary art context.
Though there is a deep understanding of the orthodoxies of colour theory and
technique in her work, it was ultimately Mellis’s relationship to the world; to
the ordinary, the experiential, the accidental and the unintended that aligns her
more closely with the work of Hayley Tompkins, whose transformation of banal
objects and images into potent surreal provocations of personal and historical
territories. There is a similarity in scale and a handling of colour as both a
material and a language that expresses an intimacy that both artists evidence
by their own hand and in doing so, skillfully mark the quotidian as a focus
for consideration. Initially looking at Mellis while thinking about Tompkins
provided an alternative perspective for this research and inevitably during this
process both artists flip-flopped back and forth to reveal and possibly create
new facets of their respective process.
Phyllida Barlow, untitled: boxes, 2015, installation shot from set
The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2015. Photo: Ruth Clark
Mellis’s method of configuring her driftwood assemblages on the floor was
wholly practical, and allowed for easy movement of the individual driftwood
pieces to be changed and reordered into infinite configurations, but her decision
to work on the floor also allowed her to think more sculpturally. Tompkins’
work Digital Light Pools (2013) resides on the floor, comprising groups of
shallow trays in various rectangular dimensions each contain stock images
of oranges, a computer cable, rainbows, cityscapes, the sea. Included within
each of these constellations are plastic trays with acrylic paint in differing
colours poured onto water and left to dry into luminous pigmented globules
reminiscent of something microscopic and of the body or other-worldly
and interstellar. Dotted next to these sit plastic water bottles half-filled with
different coloured liquids. Next to the flatness of the trays the ubiquitous
water bottles puncture into three-dimensions, reminding us that this is
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Hayley Tompkins, Digital Light Pool (Orange), 2013 (detail). Installation view Scotland + Venice 2013
Collateral Event of the 55th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia, Palazzo Pisani
Commissioned by The Common Guild for Scotland + Venice 2013. Photo: Ruth Clark
Hayley Tompkins Digital Light Pool (Earthed), 2014 (detail)
Installation view Hayley Tompkins Digital Light Pools, The Common Guild, Glasgow, 2014
Photo: Ruth Clark
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something from the real world, the shop round the corner, maybe something
the artist has used to make the work that we are looking down at now. This
particular alchemy makes us feel close to Tompkins’ hand, her process is an
intimacy though informed by carefully-made decisions, allows us to ponder the
associations that happen in the interstice between colour and the quotidian
images and materials that exist in the real world.
A connection between Mellis and Tompkins is perhaps more immediately
apparent in their treatment of materials (paint and found objects) and in
their relationship to process. Both artists construct ideas through making,
rather than sketching or research. They both make work from pushing objects
around on a floor, living (in the quotidian sense) with their materials whereby
surfaces become patinated or ingrained with human proximity, evidence of
lived experience is always visible. With this brings a temporal aspect, Mellis
and Tompkins select objects which have a visible memory, of the sea or of
the domestic, that have been used or that feel good in the hand. While both
artists came from an education in abstract painting, there is tangible frustration
with abstraction alone as a conceptual framework. Tompkins commented that
‘there is not enough reality in abstract work’9
and this problem is addressed
by a decisive democratising of form and objects which, for both artists, is
fundamentally rooted in a dismissal of the Modernist tradition. As Dominic
Paterson has said of Tompkins, ‘by accepting certain confines, [she] effectively
discards the modernist debates around the medium in favour of the more
immediate questions that might be addressed from the viewpoint of practice.’10
In many ways, Tompkins picks up where Mellis left off. Their proximity as
artists are based in practice, in the ways they recognise themselves in the world
and how they resist the burden of art history placed on them, as women their
connection is atemporal and possibly irrelevant, however an astute awareness of
time is inherent in the process of being in the world and in the articulation of
ideas. Hayley Tompkins explains;
I wanted to try to paint like light shining on an object. Light changes colour.
Each thing is inherently about time. If it is talking about life, then it can’t
avoid it. I am aware of my body producing and working in cycles of time. I am
already timed, as a woman, it is built in to our bodies and we cannot deny it.11
There could be a sense of resignation about this statement, that the physical
inevitabilities of gender are undeniable or unavoidable in some ways. However
women’s art practices have changed considerably since Mellis was establishing
her career and the construction of ungendered identities offered by Modernism
at the time were viewed as life rafts to professional survival for many post-
war women artists. Tompkins recognises that she as a women is timed, yet
there is no passivity or denial of her femaleness but rather she considers this
awareness as an active impetus to making. Both Mellis and Tompkins are
careful to describe their approaches to making art - there is a marked process of
deliberation behind every decision, parameters for chance or failure are factored
in and little, if anything, can be explained as intuitive. Omissions of art made
by women in national and regional public collections are increasingly no longer
overlooked, yet there may be some way to go in reconsidering the language used
to describe art made by women and that the nuances attributed by gendered
readings (where biographical information no longer supersedes critical analysis)
are in turn omitted too.
Appearances as we know deceive. Heads are bowed, not in deference or an act
of remembrance - for our eyes are very much open, but in contemplation of
these artworks at our feet. Whether we decide to liberate ourselves through
Tompkins’ escape-hatch or cling on for survival to Mellis’s life raft, the
alternative - inertia, is no longer a viable option.
1 Andrew Lambirth, Margaret Mellis (London: Lund Humphries 2010), pp. 7-9
2 Nedira Yakir, ‘Cornubia: Gender and Genealogy in St Ives Modernism’ in Katy Deepwell (ed)
Women Artists and Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 117
3 Lambirth, 2010, pp. 139, 147
4 The Pier Arts Centre, Orkney, Glasgow Museums, Edinburgh City Art Centre, National Galleries
of Scotland, Aberdeen Art Galleries, Highland Council and Perth Museum and Art Gallery
5 From a handwritten letter to ‘JW’ March 1992 in Glasgow Museums Resource Centre
6 Julian Spalding, ‘Foreword’, in Margaret Mellis Retrospective 1940-1987, Exhibition Catalogue,
(London: Redfern Gallery, 1987)
7 Lambirth, 2010, p. 95
8 Spalding, 1987
9 Hayley Tompkins in conversation with Dominic Paterson at The University of Glasgow, 2014
10 Will Bradley, ‘Up Until Now’, in Hayley Tompkins (Aspen: Aspen Art Museum, 2014)
11 Hayley Tompkins, in conversation with Joe Scotland, in Hayley Tompkins (Aspen: Aspen Art
Museum, 2014)
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