Exhibition, Lesley Logue & Sarah Taylor – The Pearce Institute, Govan, Glasgow – August 2024
The exhibition, The Court of Neptune, provides a platform for artists Logue and Taylor to explore their to explore their family histories and links to Govan, Glasgow. Logue’s father worked in the ship building industry, serving his apprenticeship at Fairfield Shipyard. Taylor’s father joined the Merchant Navy travelling between the UK and Australia on the passenger liner ORSOVA. The mutual family history linked to ships, sea, travel, industry and class acts as a starting point and dialogue between the artists.
The film Little pink bush explores the world of early colour pioneer Elizabeth Burris-Mayer. The film track's down and reunite's her rare published books from the 1930’s and 1940’s, taking a transatlantic trip from the UK to Connecticut USA, where she lived. The film explores the joy of her lost and hidden colour world.
Abstract:
The aim of my research is to investigate how my practice as a painter is situated within codes of class and gender as they relate to questions of aesthetics in painting. This has involved an interdisciplinary investigation into the significance drawn from the background of my own history in terms of the aesthetic decisions that have previously, and continue to inform my practice as an artist. Life writing at the intersection of class and feminist politics is the framework used to position my understanding of Aspirational Beauty. The concept of Aspirational Beauty is traced and articulated through a process of writing through multi disciplinary perspectives that incorporate and link painting, history, material culture, literature, sociology and fine art practice. The concept of Aspirational Beauty is to understand creative endeavors and practices that are outside of, or marginalized from, established theoretical conventions and definitions. Aspirational Beauty is, I argue, a creative resistance to conforming to socially inscribed ideals of respectability. My research considers Aspirational Beauty as an aesthetic resistance to class shame and a reaction to ascribed and legitimate routes of attaining cultural capital, personified by painting, the most aristocratic of art forms. My research has involved an extensive investigation of painting, by reviewing three decades of international painting survey exhibitions from 1980 to 2010. I have focused on national painting exhibitions in the 1980s to provide a perspective on the changing contexts of painting and subsequently, relations to and considerations of 'Britishness'. The choice of survey exhibitions and related exhibition catalogues as a process of review and analysis provide an extant proper record of painting; that have over time become a legitimized authoritative source of reference. I have considered my practice-as-research, exploring overt transformations of shame in relation to vulnerability and beautification within my practice as a painter. I unravel habitual acts of concealment and aesthetic cover-ups and how this functions as a veneer of respectability.
http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.695398
‘Informal Education is an open declaration of the satisfactions of fakery. Stacked against the wall and each other, not randomly but carefully composed, six stretchers covered variously with recycled fabric or oil on canvas form an assembly that taken together add up to a picture of art history learned piecemeal at art school and in the studio. Second hand silk scarves imitate an early black and white Bridget Riley, on another generic, geometric modernism; a mélange of Mondrian, Vaserely and Russian Constructivism, a reference sustained by the adjoining canvas which is a version of Malevich’s Black Square. Informal Education is Taylor’s interpretation both of her inheritance and of her desire as a painter, including at the level of materials - the dishcloths, silk scarves and head-squares - feminism’s challenge to the exclusions of high modernism: the domestic, fashion & popular culture.’
Oil on cotton napkin
Publications
Abstract
“Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.” George Tooker (1920-2011), contemporary American painter. Informed by my identity as a female working class painter and educator, the paper will introduce the concept of Aspirational Beauty, to raise awareness of and celebrate the endeavour of working class painting, often excluded from academic writing. I will also advocate for an egalitarian approach to recruiting for and teaching painting in higher education. Art historian John Golding referred to painting as the “most aristocratic of art forms”. Artist Grayson Perry has cautioned that art schools are turning into posh white ghettos. So how can an education in painting practice be accessible to and have contemporary relevance for all interested students? I will argue that one way is through Life Writing. In my research I use Life Writing as a method to explore and articulate my class background and to inform my painting. Combining perspectives from history, sociology and English literature, Life Writing supports interpretation of the consequences of class as felt and lived beyond the personal, bringing the realisation that what we refer to as autobiographical is largely historically and culturally determined. Significantly, the introduction of life writing within the art academy indicates that institutions are listening to and acknowledging the personal voice. I will present insights into my role as Lecturer teaching studio painting practice to argue that a medium specific course is a timely means for enabling the material, imaginative and cognitive processes involved in painting by facilitating subjective discovery and bringing about both personal clarity and material beauty.
Abstract
Writing for visual arts students remains a current dilemma. Academic essays frequently form assessment requirements in awards that are studio practice based. This series of images illustrates a project created for fine art undergraduates, drawing upon the research-led practice experiences of the academic leaders. The Academic Poster Project regenred a model commonly used in science to accommodate both the individual interests and methods used by visual learners, which in turn become the participating student’s plan for narrating argument, knowledge and criticality.
World of Inferiors. 2005. Taylor & Paul
