Imprinted

'In Search of Perfect Harmony' Jamie Shovlin

"my mother's....So I began to look at her and what she did with the birds in her garden. She speaks quite freely about them, almost as if they're members of her family. That was my starting point for that element. I recorded her talking about the garden. Secretly. She didn't know I was recording her. ...I was interested in what my mum talked about. Something I experienced every day which was almost invisible to me. ...

...I was interested in, things like Darwin's book.....I'd always been interested in how a public form of knowledge, as represented by a book, is individualized in usage. That is, in how people annotate certain passages of a text. And how and why they value one passage above other passages. So those two things seem to kind of represent two sides of the same coin that might be interesting if collated together and put into some form of exhibition. ....

...Alongside being a keen birdwatcher she's a keen jigsaw maker.....And I realized that the physical act of making jigsaws was done in the kitchen of the house, where she sits to watch the birds. So the two activities were psychically linked. "

interview: Jamie Shovlin discussing his installation In Search of Perfect Harmony.Recorded at Tate Britain, 25 January 2006

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/artnow/jamieshovlin/transcript.htm

I first went to see Shovlin's Exhibition last year. The first thing that I noticed were the boxes all neatly lined in a row, housing the jigsaws. Th boxes themselves were impressive, as if hand carved sculptures. Delicate and Sturdy.

Although the Jigsaws looked wonderful, I couldn't understand why Shovlin had chosen to display jigsaws. It wasn't until I got closer that I realised that the jigsaws were in fact paintings of the original objects. Instantly I walked along the side of the room to see if each jigsaw had in fact been painted so realistically on the inside floor of each box.

It has just occurred to me how similar these boxes are to Susan Hillers installation 'From the Freud Museum 1991-6'

I began looking closely at the rest of the works within the exhibition 'In Search of Perfect Harmony'. These comprised of paintings and images of birds paired with texts.

"So I began illustrating her birds. And alongside the birds were index cards that she had written detailing the birds, their habits, their characteristics. Like character notes for characters in the garden. ... page taken from an ornithology book. It had the characteristics of a bird and how you spot them. "

Within the darkened room, the main wall housed an array of images of birds, alongside were texts so that the wall became similar to that of a story board.

Through a collection of texts from books, drawings, collages from media images, index cards from his mother, the space of which Shovlin exhibited extracts from the life of him and his mother, resembled that of a museum. Each wall, each word, each drawn or painted line embedded with history and intention of understanding its own becoming.

Uncle Rudi

Extract from the poem by Kurt Drawert, 'objectivity', based on Richter's 'Uncle Rudi'

'And what if, at the bottom, there were nothing at all?


And what if, at the bottom, there were nothingness?


And what if it had nothing to do with Uncle Rudi?


And what if the painting 'Uncle Rudi' were not an image of Uncle Rudi?


Is the image "uncle Rudi' then an image of nothingness?


Who says that the photo of Uncle Rudi is an image of Uncle Rudi


And who says that Richter's painting is a photo of Uncle Rudi,


And who says that the photo of Uncle Rudi was nothing


That only Richter's painting is an image of Uncle Rudi,


Of his petty nullity, a laughing man in a uniform,


An image which shows everything.'

The image 'Uncle Rudi', paint on a photograph,blurs the boundary between photography and painting. In what class does the image fall? Because of its decent between the two descriptions, it's neither nor state, its unclear mixture, does it take on a kind of invalid state?

The uncertainties that the image holds are reiterated in Drawerts poem. There re questions of what lays beneath the surface, of a past, of what should be, should have been. They beg to bring something to ligt which are of a mystery.

Just as with this poem, it suggests that there is no subject at all but at the same time, by mentioning him so much completely surrenders to Uncle Rudi, asking for a history in which to give substance to the photo,the painting or both. He wants to look deeper.