One of my highlights during the PhotoLondon week is getting the all the exhibitions that I've been meaning to get too and revisiting the ones that I loved so much, I just can't get enough! That was certainly the case in the wonderful Irma Blank exhibition Life Time, at Alison Jacques Gallery; Since the late 1960s, Blank's singular production has focused on the recording of time as gesture. In her drawings and paintings time is inscribed as a material record of life through the material traces of the artist's labour. Located between drawing and writing, the work evokes the space of the book but encompasses paintings on canvas and paper, screen-prints and drawings in pastel, pencil and ink.
Irma said, "Writing is the home of being. I free writing from sense and highlight its structure, its skeleton, the nude sign, the sign that is such and does not refer back to anything but itself. It refers to the energy reserve, to the initial drive, the source-giving urge, the desire to reveal itself, to emerge from the secret, closed place of night."
I was delighted to manage to make the last day of Christina Mackie's new show, Drift Rust at Herald Street Gallery which closed on Sunday 22 May. I absolutely love Mackie's practice and this exhibition certainly did not disappoint. She has such an astounding ability to understand and present materiality in it's purest form, here is an excerpt from the press release, "Materials resisting catergorisation from her studio are assembled in momentary synthesis as the viewer encounters sculptural sequences, video projection, ceramics, watercolours and oil paintings...Resisting the traps of rational systems of classification and narrative containment, she encourages associative leaps rather than resting on, or seeking, any single objective truth. Visual and cognitive meandering on the part of the viewer is prompted and encouraged."
This intermixed with meeting new and old friends, sipping Champagne and taking in gallery meals, adventures off to Peckham 24 and making plans for future projects, to me, is really what those fair weeks are all about.
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