Joy Wolfenden Brown 'Poem'

About

This collection of exquisitely intuitive and intimate, small and larger scale oil paintings are imbued with the artists renowned sensitivity to absorb the physical and metaphysical world that surrounds and precedes the present moment. Evocations of fortitude combine with vulnerability resting beneath an ethereally layered and unmannered, yet luminous oily surface. The ritualistic painting process flows continuously from the artists' subconscious, as a visual reflection of deep felt experience and emotion, simultaneously confronting whilst offering the viewer comfort through the sharing of a profound and fragile truth. Figures often appear awkward, perhaps guarded, as if attempting to close the breach created through the wide eyed protagonist, offering a unique and singular window in to the soul of the subject, the artist and in turn, ourselves.

INTRODUCTION :

‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’

There comes a time when we all stand by the open grave, clumps of earth held in our hand staining our fingers, our unfocused eyes staring into the infinite abyss. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. As these poignant, bittersweet words are spoken, the soil drops like tears, falling into the void from where it has come. Earth returns to earth, a reminder of our fragile physicality. In our life we stand on the spinning ground, in our death we are enfolded in it. These words form an ending that is also a beginning. As granular soil disappears into the darkness of solid earth and words disperse into the aether, they remind us that our solidity is an illusion, our edges an impossibility. We are an energy field of atoms, a momentary coagulation of matter caught in the gravity field of this Earth.

The painter takes ground up earth, loose dust particles of pigment and binds it into coagulated matter that solidifies on the paper surface, each mark an arrested gesture, a frozen moment of bodily flow...

Read more/lessEven in our stillness there is infinitesimal movement, a breathing in and a breathing out, the gentle rise and fall of the diaphragm, our edges dissolving as we inhale the void: earth, air, ashes, dust, our body, all floating in an atomic sea of potential creation, remembering in anticipation what will come; time past, present and future bound together in fragile forms.

But in-between the reuniting of earth and earth, ashes and ashes, dust and dust there is the ‘to’, two letters holding the space between, the gap where we exist. Two letters that contain the whole journey of life, a brief coalescence of particles, where ashes dance and dust floats and we exist for a short moment of time.

Joy Wolfenden Brown’s paintings allow us to glimpse the ‘to’. Her figures are caught in the space between, suspended in momentary stasis, a reminder that we are a breath of stardust; a fleeting, fragile form caught like condensation on a window; a passing shadow crossing the earth, leaving behind the subtle imprint of our passing. They confront us with the transience of the ‘to’, their stares inviting us to fall again into the void, where we find an emptiness full of presence. We reach out to hold them, but they dissipate before our gaze, evaporating into an evanescent mist of exquisite memory. They appear before us, kneeling, staring, standing, sitting; gentle souls too fragile to be grasped, teasing us like a half-remembered whisper, or a tender annunciation of invisible presence.

These figures are held in delicate spaces where what was solid has dissolved into shimmering clouds of immateriality and where colourful prisms surround them in a waterfall of invisible light. In this stillness her figures find quiet communion with nature, the deep interconnectedness of the earth’s shalom, a peace that transcends time and space, heaven and earth, life and death pulling us into an eternity where we are all one.

Dr Richard Davey, 2020