Newsletter October 2025 - The doing and the undergoing: notes on Pat Porter's painting, Clare-Louise Bennett's recent novels and Tim Ingold's essay 'On not knowing and paying attention: how to walk in a possible world.'
Last week I saw a show of paintings by Pat Porter at Goldmark gallery. She rarely exhibited throughout her life and when she did it was often alongside her husband who was the better known artist. Despite this lack of outside recognition and encouragement which apparently did affect and disappoint her, she continued to paint every day. I loved the sheer conviction in her work, it was as if she didn't allow herself to doubt, there's no mediation between her and the action of painting. The paintings range from subdued almost murky depictions of still lives; arrangements of jugs, bowls, plates she had close to hand, all of the greys mixed from the amalgamation of colours across her palette. To lively, blockier paintings that flatten out the space, edges abruptly come up against each other, decisive lines delineate between object and background. It's interesting though that rather than moving further towards 'abstraction' later in life, like many painters do, she consistently worked back and forth between these modes. Led by whatever was happening in front of her, she didn't need to define it, or make it 'fit' into a pre-decided upon process.
This openness, led by the doing of it, feels like a rare thing to see within the work itself. Especially now. Maybe it's because she wasn’t exposed to the pressures of showing her work publicly and it being externally defined. Her paintings connect for me to Tim Ingold’s writing on the distinction between ‘ignorance and not-knowing’ and the ‘doing and undergoing of experience.’ In his paper for the Irish Journal of Sociology 2023, as a way of positioning against the rise of certainty and knowledge pushed by the media, institutions, politics, he argues that knowledge is not equal to wisdom and that wisdom comes from a place of openness to the process of undergoing that happens in the doing. ‘In everything we do, there is also an experience we undergo. We are modified in body and mind, perhaps even transformed, by the doing of it.’ This process is accessible through the opening out of our attention. Lack of pre-definition means an abundance of possibilities.
I just read Claire-Louise Bennett's new novel Big Kiss, Bye-Bye which feels like writing that embodies this notion. She creates a place of evasiveness, where nothing is explained, no deep dictatorial message is conveyed. The novel takes us through a liminal stage in a woman's life as she moves from the city into the countryside and transitions out of a relationship. Seemingly happenstance occurrences bring back long forgotten memories, or propel her forward into new realisations, but nothing really seems to be happening.
After Big Kiss, Bye-Bye I started her 2015 novel Pond which details the experiences of a woman living in solitude on the edge of a coastal town. We are not told anything really about this woman, any description of where she’s living, what she looks like. Instead we gather who she is based on her stream of consciousness, her relationship to, and observations of, the objects around her. Claire said that in writing Pond she wanted to create a ‘back and forth between garrulousness and then a pulling back, or a strange obfuscation or evasiveness’. Like Big Kiss, Bye-Bye the novel is disseminated by the information that has been withheld. Reading It felt like grasping at the edges, trying to pin it down but never quite managing to.
It makes me think how mad it is that this feels refreshing. Because so many experiences now are devoid of that openness and deviation. It’s interesting thinking about how she enables space in her writing for absence to be present. The absence of knowledge creating an opening, like the space in Pat Porter’s paintings, to commit to phenomenological experience, to the doing of it. This way of thinking through process is easy to lose sight of in the studio for me, sometimes feeling like I need to give myself permission to just do, no matter the outcome. I think Pat's paintings and Claire's writing hold on to this notion really beautifully.
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Accompanying essay for 'Where and When You Are' South Parade 3 October - 9 November 2024
As I made this show it felt more pertinent than ever that the engagement in the process of painting connected to the wider subject of the work. Through writing I wanted to find a way around these slippery and still evolving questions and thoughts. Not to be prescriptive, or to write directly to the subjects of the paintings, but as a means of opening up some defining voices, routes in, and alongside, which guided the making.
The process of painting was tilting me back to think more deeply about the connection between the agency we have over our attention and the conditions within space for full all-encompassing solitude - physical and psychological.
The necessity of the solitude of the studio.
‘Serious interruptions come from the watchful eye we cast upon ourselves. There is the blow that knocks the arrow from its mark! There is the drag we throw over our intentions. There is the interruption to be feared!’ [1]
Moving one’s attention with will; how do we enable and protect it?
Just as our attention is monetised, so is the pace at which we are expected to respond. All time becomes present and within those conditions, not doing or not being seen to be doing is discouraged. Granting yourself permission to not respond is a radical act. Both within the inner process of making a painting and outwards to our experiences in the environments we inhabit, travel through, make for ourselves and contribute to, there is a space for active attention and receptivity that holds potential.
‘Parties to interaction face each other with their identities and objectives already in place, and transact in ways that serve, but do nothing to transform, their separate interests [...] Interaction is thus a between relation.
Correspondence, however, goes along.[...] This shift from interaction to correspondence entails a fundamental reorientation, from the between-ness of beings and things to their in-between-ness’. [2]
In his essay, Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible, John Berger writes that ‘the impulse to paint comes neither from observation or the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter - the encounter between painter and model.’[3] This definition of the mysterious ‘opening up’ of collaboration that makes a painting foregoes the painter as the dominant voice. Instead, if allowed to, correspondence with the subject opens out a space for something else to evolve.
In relation to having agency over my own attention, both inside and outside of the studio, I'm thinking about how to enable and maintain the conditions for this to come into play. This feels like an uncomfortable space of ‘not knowing’ which sits hand in hand with doubt. At some point a painter feels that they have relinquished control, and in that encounter with the painting, surprises happen. You are pushed into a new visual flux that you couldn’t imagine before you began. It is in this encounter, married with the intention to meet it, that you are carried into new possibilities.
‘Practices of attention and curiosity are inherently open-ended, oriented towards something outside of ourselves. Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding - seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions - and instead with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped or known’.[4]
In the decisive commitments, and their unravelling, which happen when painting, there is a continuous tension for me between definition and ambiguity. How does the combination of colour, brush stroke movement, application, composition, and space, enable a reading of the painting that is both explicit and implicit?
Each scene depicted relates to an interior or perspective that existed in real time. However, throughout the process any references to a concrete location or time are removed. In the emerging read of the painting, moments of legibility are constructed alongside dissolving edges and the breakdown of forms. Through the making of, and the experience of the painting in its completion, I'm attempting to hold on to the unknown - against immediacy and a definitive understanding.
The slow unfolding of the paintings in their viewing is an invitation to take time. Specific viewpoints guide, the window simultaneously provides access and prevents entry. Reflections on glass point to what we are up against, what’s behind us. In several paintings we are situated within, looking out, a pane of glass mediating between us and the landscape beyond. In others we are on the outside and we look in and through.
Entry to the painting is framed by specific cropping of the scene, which also emphasises the absence of others.
Can you talk about solitude without talking about loneliness? Both states sit right up against each other and fold in on one another. You can be lonely in a room full of people. You can feel the flame of contentment in solitude sitting in the corner of a restaurant alone. Leaving a party, you walk out of the door and breathe a sigh of relief.
‘Loneliness is solitude with a problem,’[5] Maggie Nelson writes. The short journey across from the uncomfortable space of loneliness to the contentment of chosen solitude is within reach.
‘Where now is the space for this kind of private self? [...] We are so trained by the machine to respond to its prompts that time away from the screen seems empty. Increasingly, there is little opportunity for us to be with ourselves [...]
Instead, we are suddenly suspended, waiting for something to happen’.[6]
Waiting to react.
What about the time to do nothing? A note in my studio diary reads; ‘I just need to pull back, know when to leave things alone.’ Some paintings demand an opening up of time for something to evolve beyond action. What is happening when the paintings are sat in the studio, germinating? Several works in this show emerged into themselves whilst they were untouched, others demanded to be met with immediate action. Sweet peas from the garden in a jar on the table didn’t warrant over work. In that attempt to harness a fleeting moment the paint was put down quickly, areas of the aluminium surface left to contribute to the forms. It could only have happened though because of the others before it.
Commute was the last painting I made for the show and the one that sat in my head the longest. I took the source image three years ago during my daily drive to work along the same route. The mundanity of routine, getting to and from, is something we can all relate to. Arriving at the office without being able to recount anything about the journey. If practices of attention allow us to ‘leave behind the coordinates of what we habitually notice,’ [7] to notice what we would habitually not, then they enable a complete reorientation of our relationship towards the spaces we inhabit. This painting came out of the need to find a way to communicate that experience, a moment of recognition in amongst a dissociation with the here and now.
In that space of receptivity, it is not only the ‘encounter with the model’ that becomes tangible to us, but our attention itself.