Notes on a Return
Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne 
February to September 2009



”In 1985, 1986 and 1987, five internationally acclaimed artists Anne Bean, Rose English, Mona Hatoum, Bruce McLean and Nigel Rolfe made live artworks at the Laing Art Gallery. Today we are tracking down the residual fragments of these artworks that have survived in our memories. Working with these partial and incomplete traces, the works from over twenty years ago will be brought to ‘the here and now’ through a collective live process involving the artists, the witnesses and the gallery itself. “
Sophia Hao, Curator



My work from the time was called Pain tings

pain      perception of discomfort of varying intensity
tings     light metallic sounds



When Sophia Hao originally approached me about this project, I sensed it buried but resonant in some non-verbal hinterland. 



Pain tings has grown from this into a revelatory experience for me about retrieval, connections and how forgetting and disappearance have a powerful reverberation, offering a more luminous exploration than responding to meticulous documentation. 



I found myself uncovering layers within layers not ventured into for decades. The dark photos that Sophia had dug out from Locus+ Archives of the original performance intrigued me and I decided, as an investigation, to try to re-create these in an intensive private performance. 



Numerous body-cell memories were aroused and I found myself trying to keep up with each trigger and unveiling. I was once again acutely aware that every painting throughout history was a document of its own live action and that, fundamentally, this revelation had been the spark for my initial venturings into performance/process.
    


The performance at the Laing in 1987 had consisted of the production with witnesses of approximately 10 paintings, each on a blank paper or canvas within an ornate gold frame. A vast range of ways of working was utilised and references were made to other painters such as Goya and Blake. Each of the actions touched on the kinds of ‘conversation’ one has whilst painting and with a painting.



An intrinsic part of this painting process was the presence of the writer, critic and editor of Performance Magazine, Rob la Fresnais. I asked Rob to respond to the work during the making so that he was both a critic and a part of what he was critiquing. 



He sat typing at a typewriter, ‘ting’, ‘ting’, ‘ting’, in the middle of the space, ostensibly making notes towards a review and then reading them out at arbitrary moments during the piece. I then used his words to include in the paintings or to change a thought about the next one. 



Rob represented for me both the voice of the audience, a collective pheromone that one is often finely tuned into during performance, as well as the voice of the critic, overly sanctioned and unduly powerful.



The exhibition at the Laing consisted of these new Pain tings, a typewriter with its own recorded sound playing, slides used in the original performance and photocopied drawings of mine from the 80s spilling into the room.