Resonance and Wonder - Paintings and Songs

About

Paula MacArthur first met Danish artist, Tine Louise Kortermand when they shared an exhibition space in Bushwick, Brooklyn in 2016. The two artists are connected through their interest in the resonance of objects and our responses to them. In Brooklyn, Tine created her Resound songs on the spot in response to problems and worries that visitors shared with her; using an object - a toy camera, a xylophone & even hair - offered by each participant as a starting point to create sound and act as inspiration for each song. Tine had the tongue in cheek idea that each song would provide some kind of magical solution or relief to these problems in a kind of pseudo therapeutic way.

Tine’s musical response to objects creates has a clear resonance with each participant which also transfers to a wider audience as they put on the headphones and listen. ‘Everything she does exudes a genuine and natural sense of experimentation with artistic expression. She has a liberatingly unorthodox approach to music and performance. The works take their starting-point in things which are immediate and real, such as plants, landscapes, human destinies or ancient myths; and on this basis, she spins a fascinating net of atmospheres and draws us into a surrealistic, dreaming universe' (Camilla Jalving from the Magazine VITAVRAP – lifestyle).

 For Paula, these objects resonate on a deep personal level, yet communicate universally. She sees them as contemporary ‘momento-mori’; artworks designed to remind the viewer of their mortality and of the shortness and fragility of human life. In her painting, enlarged, an arabesque detail becomes a surging monolithic growth, which is recognisable but unnameable. Tiny, exquisite details are enlarged, edited & the form described in dissolving paint; beauty and riches become slippery things as the surface becomes both seductive and repellent. The illusion becomes paint; it both defines and denies the subject and these objects of desire decay in front of our eyes.The gestures and trails of running paint are however, from a distance, invisible and Paula’s paintings appear quite photographic. The subject dissolves as the viewer approaches to take a closer look and the focus moves from the subject, to the materiality of the painting process. MacArthur works to replicate the form with both viscous and diluted colour, by allowing it to slip and merge the painterly forms become as mutable as the contradictory responses the subjects trigger.