SOFT HEART

About

Art, transporting and the collapsible, here compressed to the folding and rolling of linen and burlap – the re-stretching, stitching and re-connecting of materials, stories, and histories. Leading us poetically and with a Soft Heart to fragments of thought about what cannot be carried; what cannot be mended. The art weighs heavily and so the desire is to travel lightly with it.
 
The initial concept, more aspiration rather, emerged from Koorland’s desire to put together an entire show of paintings that could fit inside one suitcase. In this aim she may have failed, but she has come as close as she could.
 
Some of the pieces that finally arrived travelled whole, some canvases were rolled and then re-stretched, or reconfigured, and some paintings were never reunited with their stretcher-frames, but rather stitched together and installed in the gallery like tapestries.. Included in the Leyden Gallery show are mostly recent smaller-scale (for Koorland) script paintings of songs and poems, made this past year or two with an intimate, note-to-self quality, with an occasional older piece, inserted, as Koorland says, for content and colour.

Living in New York and faced with transporting my paintings for exhibition in London, this show especially, bears the imprint of my friends who helped me carry them as well as the conditions and happenstance that governed the making of this work. For all of this, I feel grateful.
 

Illness, treatments, changing locations and even the weather all came to bear on this show and its component parts and these factors altogether determined this particular grouping at the Leyden gallery. So much so, that as this process unfurled, the fragile flux and circumstances also became my subject.

I am thrilled also to include FOUR EASY VIDEOS, filmed for me so tenderly by Adrian Rifkin, both godfather and midwife of this show, by way of injecting some of the songs I've painted.

 
Vivienne Koorland, London,
September, 2016