Sheila Ravnkilde: 'Boxes - 68 Colours' At Lakeside, Nottingham

Sheila Ravnkilde, 'Boxes - 68 Colours' (Detail), Exact Details Unknown, 2014

In my last post I discussed my visit to the exhibition ‘And Now It’s Dark: American Night Photography’ at Nottingham’s Lakeside Arts Centre.  Whilst there,  my eye was also drawn to a site-specific wall piece by Sheila Ravnkilde in the attractive day-lit exhibition space outside the main gallery.

Sheila Ravnkilde, 'Boxes - 68 Colours', Exact Details Unknown, 2014

‘Boxes - 68 Colours’ is a simple enough idea, comprising 68 small cubes mounted in a regular grid, each painted in a different colour and painterly manner.  The variation in paint consistency, application method and surface quality appears endless, (well, 68-fold, at least), as do the colour selections.  Although many of the individual colours are quite saturated, and the contrasts between adjacent boxes quite dramatic, the relationship of each to the white spaces between and the piece’s overall formality, create a mood of refined elegance and calm.

Sheila Ravnkilde, 'Boxes - 68 Colours' (Detail), Exact Details Unknown, 2014

This is accentuated by the gorgeous quality of the illumination that saturates the space.  I’m guessing the site-specificity of the piece was in part a response to that.  I also imagine that Ravnkilde’s agenda is also to explore how the idea of infinite variation within such a standard format, might create a never-the same-twice situation each time it is applied to a different location.  It’s an effective and seductive, if not exactly game-changing, solution, rooted firmly in high Modernism.

Sheila Ravnkilde, 'Boxes - 68 Colours' (Detail), Exact Details Unknown, 2014

What really drew me in to this essentially quite polite artwork though, was the way that the 68 cubes activate the three-dimensional space immediately in front of a two-dimensional wall plane.  Their relief quality means that this space exists in activated, articulated volumes between each element and its neighbours.  It also means that the effects of colour and surface extend over five surfaces each time, multiplying the range of combinations of light, shadow and adjacent contrasts exponentially.  I spent as much time viewing the piece edge-on as I did frontally, and was struck by how its sophistication and complexity increased with each new perspective.  Not least amongst these is the enjoyable way that fluid paint has been allowed to drip down the sides of several boxes after having been applied to the front surface.  This is done in slightly too controlled and predictable a manner to be truly expressive, but it does throw yet another interesting element of randomness into the pot.

Various Of My Paintings, Edge View

This attention to the edges of nominally ‘flat’ wall-based artworks is something that interests me greatly.  My own use of rigid painting panels is partly for practical reasons to do with layering and sanding collage materials.  However, it is also because of the scope it gives me to carry an image around the edges of a painting.  In fact I deliberately build my panels with the 2”X1” battens fixed edge-on to create that little bit of extra depth, for that very reason.  I hope this is more than mere affectation, and an attempt to avoid the various implications of framing without leaving a raw edge.

Various Of My Paintings, Edge View

The slightly paradoxical idea of a painting as a self-conscious object, rather than a purely illusionistic window onto a parallel, imagined reality, has always interested me.  In fact, as I increasingly start to think about the truly intangible shadows & light illusionism of video as a medium, the comparative substance of paintings intrigues me even more.  I love the idea of paintings as functionally ‘useless’, but intellectually/imaginatively/expressively essential objects.  Somehow, the idea that you could mend the roof or create an ad-hoc coffee table with one in an emergency seems to accentuate rather than diminish their true power when simply allowed to become ineffable and self-justifying.  Perhaps that’s just what all Art is really, - a form of imaginative Alchemy, often using the simplest of means.