Cathie Pilkington, Bridget Riley Fellow, speaks about the work she has produced during her residency at the BSR ahead of the Spring Open Studios 2025.
'Although I most heartedly agree with travelling and seeing the country generally before commencing work I must say that my experience has been this – if one has no ideas or compositions on the go, it is a difficult matter to concentrate, it is so easy to wander round galleries idly and dutifully staring at the exhibits and to tramp through the country like someone on a summers holiday whereas with some ideas or some definite purpose at the back of mind one is continually on the look out for something that can be applied and in this way many other things are seen that one never set out nor expected to find.'
The second half of my time as Bridget Riley Fellow has been much more studio focussed. After many site visits on the first half of the fellowship, I have had the opportunity to test out formal and technical ideas on a large scale, and as a result, work has developed in unforeseen ways.
Library of forms: Producing feeling through form.
I have been developing drawings of dumb animal forms. These have been partially culled from Roman and Etruscan sculpture, reliefs, floor mosaics and wall paintings. With a focus on the peripheral, I have adapted ideas from around the edges of grand narratives – the decorative borders or supporting animal motifs that often frame the centre stage action.
I am interested in something very specific and hard to pin down in words: How to produce complex feeling through graphic simplicity. I am looking for an awkward animation, a whimsical obtuseness, an oblique muteness, an object like animal form which holds an ambivalence, a blank exuberance. This is part of an on going problematic search for a visual language that can speak of something pre lingual. This quality seems to reside in images of dumb herd animals – often things that we eat or hunt – animal lives that disappear into motifs, ideas or human utility.
An intensity of connection to these subjects has developed throughout my time in Italy as a result of profound encounters with ancient sites and objects. Standing in immersive decorated ancient rooms and tombs, witnessing first hand the surviving ‘part- images’ embedded in the surfaces of architecture. The anonymity of its makers adds to the power that resides in this material, its emotional impact seems to slip away from language and historical fact.
The writer and critic Brian Dillon speaks about daring to deal with this ‘remainder’ this quality or sensation which sits outside of history, theory or criticism in a conversation about putting together his book Affinities
… but idiotic too, in the original sense of an uncultured, uncivil, private urge. Was it quite so stupid to want to dodge the public and professional, try to refind a mode of dumb fascination.
Technical/Material
I have been responding to this emotional and psychological content through drawing: how do you produce feeling through form? I have been thinking about non-narrative – the tension between object and image and trying to find a physicality of process in two dimensions which provides me with a mental equivalent to the way I assemble sculpture, move things around and think through objects.
Since there is no gravity or resistant material to deal with in pictorial space – there are new adventures in figure/ground to explore. What happens when that pictorial space is everywhere? The floor, the wall, the curtains…
Studio Cave/Scaling Up
The way that imagery has been accruing and migrating around the studio in various combinations and dispositions is a deliberate experiment in subjectivity. There is intimacy, distance and improvisation – Imagery is transferred, buried and revealed, re-assessed and re-deployed around the live-work studio space.
Blurring boundaries of studio home and gallery space has long been a feature of my work, so the situated studio of BSR is a literal manifestation of this interest. This, resists finality and questions hierarchies of working and looking – imagery permeates across the floor and onto the curtains, gradually, covering surfaces in pervasive images, patterns and seeping colour –like the margins of medieval manuscripts, or Bridget Riley Op Art – blocking out the light, encroaching on the viewer.
Re occurring animal imagery and graphic pattern includes an Elephant enclosed in a womb like speech bubble – appearing most insistantly on the curtains, this embarrassing or vulnerable image can be opened up or pushed away – like blurting something out from the unconscious. The past and the present coexist in the same psychical space. The layers of our own personal history are not neatly differentiated: memories from different periods of life intersect with each other and seep into things.
I need my memories; they are my documents.
SCALING UP/PAPER FOLDING
An important part of my time here has been the ability to experiment with scaling up and allowing things to get out of hand, to take up space. Developing ideas around the paper Frieze or cartoon has lead to experiments with paper folding – taming huge rolls of paper by folding into a map like format. This creates a feeling of provisionally that I am interested in – a working, planning document for future use, something you can fold up and pack away.
Life and Death Drawing is a first trial of using the Library of Forms to assemble a large work. Images are transferred and re assembled like objects, across the surface of the folded paper. In this case the image is very literal – the picture plane is divided with a medieval simplicity – upper and lower levels – life and death.
The Archaeological Metaphor.
The Zoo Archaeologists Shed is just behind my studio. The word assemblage has a different meaning to an archaeologist than an artist. The archaeologist receives ‘an assemblage’ of bones from a dig – their job is to identify and piece together as many of the bones as possible to form a picture of the whole beast – when it lived and died – maybe what its diet was – where it came from. Most are cut into pieces by the butcher, some are sacrificed. The archaeological metaphor was used a lot by Freud to describe the process of Psychoanalysis – excavating the unconscious layer by layer. In Art, an assemblage is a work made by combining disparate elements – sometimes objects which have been scavenged by the artist. On my visit to the shed I was very interested to see the colour of roman animal bones.
In her book Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett describes the assemblage as “A material cluster of charged parts, vibrant materials of all sorts, a living throbbing confederation – The effects generated by an assemblage are emergent properties, emergent in their ability to make something happen…”
BLACK GROUND
I learnt recently that the Egyptians use the same word for ‘uterus’ as ‘mineshaft’ and that the English poet and cleric John Donne’s last sermon draws analogies between the uterus and the grave. In his book exploring the creative process The Hidden order of Art, the teacher and psychologist Anton Ehrenzweig recounts a conversation he had with a student – who wanted to make pots the inside of which felt bigger than the pots themselves – he mentioned that the Indian caves had the same paradoxical feeling –
That the freely scattered wall paintings counteracted the claustrophobia of the closed in caves and inaccessible passageways – giving a feeling of limitless oceanic expression where the inner space expands into an entire world.
In Folding Inventory, I am exploring my interest in using a black ground. In this work, animal forms are unmoored from narrative, decorative or compositional function. Laid out like an inventory, a sewing pattern or reliquary, they float freely on the folded black ground. The images emerge or disappear into this darkness.
The folded and re folded paper behaves like fabric draped over the studio table – a table cloth. The image can be revealed, obliterated or re combined in hybrid forms or fragments depending on the chosen position. The drawing becomes a kind of object which can be moved and re arranged – there is no fixed position, no one orientation for viewing, a resistance to finality.
To write in fragment is to admit that your self itself is a problem of form, that form in turn is a form of life – in this case, dispersed, provisional, filled with doubts and potential...
While I swam I thought about the ostriches which are supposed to bury their heads in the sand but are in fact burying their eggs, turning them round in the earth with their beaks
Bibliography:
Hettie Judah: What’s ‘Wrong’, Cathie Pilkington? Weird Horses, Karsten Schubert, London.(2023)
Why Look at Animals? John Berger (1977)
The Hidden Order of Art: A study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination. Anton Ehrenzweig (1967)
Vibrant Matter: A political Ecology of Things. Jane Bennett (2009)
The Cost of Living: Deborah Levy (2018)
In Defence of the Fragment. Brain Dillon, Spike Magazine (Winter 2025)
Civilization and its Discontents. Sigmund Freud. (1930)
Affinities. Brian Dillon. Fitzcarraldo Editions (2023)
