Melinda Clyne – Solo Exhibition

Light Is Time, Gesture Is Space

Factory 49, 2 - 12 December 2020

Variable Gesture Units

“The fundamental life of any material I use is concretized in that material’s gesture…

Manifest in space, any particular gesture acts on the eye as a unit of time.

Performer or glass, fabric, wood … all are potent as variable gesture units...”

Carolee Schneeman[1]

 A gesture is generally understood as a brief action of the body in space. Whether it’s a wave, flourish or flinch – it derives from the effulgence of living and communicating, and above all is expressive of an emotional state. Gesture in painting though is another thing; it is more specifically tied to the artist’s hand, and by extension the brush, loaded with the potent and visceral matter of paint as coloured mark. To read gesture in paint is also to read emotion, but it is a visual and material tracing of a mark as a past action. While the colour, character and form remains vibrant, the action is already in the past. The paint has dried and is still. In that cured state though, the gesture as a frozen movement remains permanently open to spectation and interpretation - a moment in an object - to be returned to time and again. 

In Melinda Clyne’s solo exhibition at Factory 49, Light Is Time, Gesture Is Space she gathers versions of gesture and presents them in a way that is neither expressive movement nor dried painting, though they are certainly of them. Made from cast acrylic, applied paint and directed light they embody stilled moments of time and space, as unified material gestures.

The works exhibited utilise industrial sheets of flat acrylic, available in multiple single colours, and transparencies. Just like paint. In a brief moment of heat and time, Clyne is able to control and manipulate the acrylic by gloved hands by folding the material into its final cast form. Restricted by oven dimensions in her studio, the scale is modest and the effect intimate. The pieces are then partially painted, and occasionally cut, with sharp lines, hard angles. If lyrical were to meet geometric abstraction in a gestural dance under confinement, here it is. Presented suspended on white gallery walls, illuminated, the works speak of gesture and formalism in painting while being pinned down to the gaze. 

As they are wall-based, Clyne’s works reference the historical position taken by painting, and its attendant authority in addressing the expected viewing stance, though by playfully gesturing away from the wall they actively engage sensory perception. Within the works themselves the fusion of the formal concerns of painting with the performativity of immobilised gestures characterises the artistic intention behind this exhibition. Seeing herself primarily as a painter, Clyne set out to find a material form with which she could explore many dualities – eros/logos, emotion/logic, curved/straight, light/dark, hard/soft, machine/human, ethereal/material. She says she went searching for the visual representation of paradox explored in her painting, but now in a three-dimensional context. She found it, simply and eloquently, in the performativity of heated then cooled cast acrylic rectangles, a material tangle and truce. The Covid-19 pandemic this year enabled a retreat into the studio to investigate and experiment with material and the result is the body of work shown in this exhibition.

Consider the Hexagon Personalised [cast acrylic and paint, 30 x 35cm 2020]. At first glance, its form and title reference the known geometry of a hexagon. Yet across its centre, an elongated swell breaks the flawless surface – the emergent fold at odds with rectilinearity and flatness - lifting the form up and away from the wall in a heaving, rippling gesture. The semi-opaque acrylic implies a softness and subtlety about the motion and this is accentuated by the diffused quality of light as it is absorbed into its surface. In a play on painting, Clyne has applied a painted hard edge to the form’s edge, delineating the industrial satin edge from the wall behind, though tellingly she allows this linearity to fade where the gestural movement is at its most pronounced.

 Other works in the exhibition continue this engagement of expressive form with hard-edged paint. One large piece in transparent orange lends itself to refraction when lit with high lumen light. The warp of the material is exposed; the marks of tensile distortion then appearing magnified on the adjacent gallery wall. The grid and seriality are also referenced, capturing gestural action in a manner that recalls Muybridge’s motion studies. In certain works, moulded then painted to opacity the references to painting are more obvious and the manipulated material readily recalls buckled and crumpled canvas. One singular work [The Picture Rail, cast acrylic and paint, 300cm x 200cm] specifically addresses the Factory 49 site. It is placed so as to continue the line of an internal gallery door jamb, playing out Klee’s adage of drawing in space as taking a line for a walk, the sky blue suggesting, as it has for many artists, immensity and the infinite.

At some point in my visit to the painter’s studio, I had to question, why plastic? In a world besieged by and seemingly at war with plastic waste, Clyne justifies the use of the material in practical terms. As ‘art’, this acrylic has permanence, is not used in single- use plastic products, and since it is readily available to all at the local hardware store, it is non-elitist. Also, as a stable versatile material ,it is a pervasive and essential component of our technological age, for instance ,it is a component of most medical devices, counter-top protective screens for workers during covid, and aircraft windscreens..

 Asking Clyne about her references reveals a wealth of art historical and other influences; abstraction as it developed in post war painting in Italy and the US; Bonalumi (a contemporary of Fontana), action painting, Light and Space, Finish/Fetish, Minimalism, Judd and Anne Truitt (whose three-dimensional work was hand-painted and therefore judged harshly by the Minimalists!). Her practice is a contemporary inheritor of these, along with her interests in the role of the haptic body, gesture, and Feminism (- she mentions performance artist Carolee Schneeman, as well as Australian writer Anne Summers, who discusses the history of women’s suppression in this country.).

 A background as a scientist (qualified physiotherapist) also explains what she terms her “relentless experimentations” in materiality. With that knowledge, it is intriguing to consider her affinity for hand-forming this malleable material, as a similar material is used by therapists to support hand injuries. For Clyne, it is the obdurate hardness and rectilinearity of the industrial material that presents a challenge to be overcome., facilitating a magical transformation.

“This material is reticent, it does not want to fold and crumple in response to my hand force.”

Melinda Clyne, in our studio conversation.

And yet, bend it does. Like paint squeezing up out of the tube in a gush as pure colour there is this inherent flexibility in heated acrylic, which gives an artist control (albeit for an intensely brief time) while leaving no imprint of the artist’s hand. For Clyne, it is essential that the hand of the artist is both seen and unseen in a temporal back and forth between presence and absence, between action and stillness. Unlike the gestural action of a painted brush stroke, there is no possibility of wiping away or overpainting. The material cools in a moment, accepts its fate and the gesture is cast. Within, embodied in the materiality of the object is a strong evocation of that frozen forceful movement in time. 

Variable gesture units is a term borrowed from Carolee Schneeman, the full quotation at the start of this essay seen in a paper clipping in Clyne’s studio, among the works being prepared for this show. It seems appropriate, for the way it describes the material itself enacting the gesture, which is then encapsulated in time and space, to act on the eye.

 A Variable Gesture Unit is a momentary movement set in the confined space of a viewing container. The effect is to isolate, magnify, even dramatise the encounter between the object and the viewer. The unit of space for that encounter is the white-walled gallery space. 

Lisa Pang (Lisa Sharp)

November 2020

[1] Carolee Schneeman “I Assume the Senses Crave …” (1974) republished in Carolee Schneeman: Uncollected Texts ed. Brandon W Joseph (Brooklyn, Primary Information, 2018).