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| Joyce W Cairns | Conversation with a Kestrel | oil on board |15 x 21cm |
Kilmorack’s latest exhibition of works by Joyce W Cairns presents the female protagonist, or witness, in evolving guises. From the beautiful four seasons suite of oils on panel to the monumental The Magic Gate and Other Stories, Cairns’ art brings us face to face with memories that define who we are. Though autobiographical details are present, the critical baseline of her work is humanity and the collective psyche. Her paintings cross multiple thresholds of time and memory, using collected objects as catalysts for the imagination. In The Magic Gate and Other Stories (oil on panel 183 x 244cm) the artist’s mastery of composition leads the mind into an interior landscape of familial relationships. The foreground table and its contents become part of the viewer’s space. There are triggers of association in the children’s storybook once read aloud, a bowl adorned with bountiful post war promise, a commemorative royal mug, a jungle service pamphlet, a greetings card for “Mummy” and a packet of sweets with the pastel fizz taste of youth and innocence.
Joyce W Cairns | The Magic Gate and Other Stories | oil on panel | 183 x 244cm
Arterial, stylised treatment of the rowing boat, upturned as a gateway or birth canal, aligns with the Mother figure on the far left, standing on the ultimate threshold. Whilst many of these references are highly personal, the way we are skillfully led into the work reflects the fluidity and universal experience of human memory. Remembrance tokens are worn around the neck like military identification in the onward march of life. These visual touchstones enable us to make our own connections. Like the work of Max Beckmann, the compression of human figures in the picture plane create a deeply psychological sense of transformative awareness, from child to adult and viewer to witness. Past and present are entwined around the central protagonist, cradling the memory of a pet cat like a child, glancing sideways at the human procession of remembrance behind her. Immediately at her back, the figure of an old woman peers over a prow, one of the guises of the protagonist, sensing her own mortality. The child holding a doll stands at the apex of the composition with a hen on her head, a victim in the anthropomorphised form of a passive, domesticated bird and a recurrent trope in Cairns’ art. The palette of steely nocturnal blue to pure ultramarine, sharply accented with cadmium yellow, red and alizarin crimson heighten the emotive qualities of the painting, as our gaze shifts between human relationships, experiences of youth and age. Cairns’ Father appears in the left-hand corner of the image, as a witness beneath the picture plane. In these dreamlike spaces, we are confronted with awakening conscience.
Joyce W Cairns | The North Star | oil on board | 15 x 21cm
In The Magic Gate and Other Stories the high horizon of Aberdeen harbour and the village of Footdee are thresholds for the soul’s journey on the edge of the sea. The orientation of true North is exemplified in the oil on board painting The North Star (15 x 21cm). The female protagonist gestures inward, to the yellow multifaceted star at the centre of her being, diagonally aligned with the lighthouse guiding her. The brilliant ultramarine of unconscious night envelopes the image, illuminated by pale skin and vibrant cadmium red. It feels like a curtain is lifted on the artist’s navigation through life, plunging oceanic depths of collective self, tenaciously driven to out-create destruction. In the exquisite Conversation with a Kestrel (oil on board, 15 x 21cm) Cairns poetically renders a sharing of secrets in blood-red crimson. The intimate communion with Nature and one’s own nature comes to the fore in an image that is as powerful as it is beautiful. From these smaller scale works to her epic War Tourist paintings, Cairns is an artist who powerfully confronts what it is to be human, revisiting artefacts and memories of the past, to awaken consciousness in the present.
Georgina Coburn, October 2018
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