Catalogue essay for 2007 Dowse Museum Exhibition 'Conversations'
Meshworks - the interweaving vectors of the body and the world in the paintings of Lorraine Rastorfer
by Jacquie Clarke
The movement of fabric in the wind is the most surface of the meanings invoked by the work of Wellington abstract painter Lorraine Rastorfer. The southern coastline where her studio and home is located takes the brunt of the Cook Strait tempest: the speed and volume of wind is measured in her daily journey past the wind socks of the airport, the tussock grasses on the beachfront, or the anti-gravitational play of items on washing-lines. South Wellington is also the place where she grew up. After many years both abroad and in Auckland, where she taught at the Manukau Institute of Technology, she has once again made it as her home and is now a Senior Lecturer in Visual Arts at WelTec.
In her painterly methodology Rastorfer has, with painstaking exactness, found a way to work paint so that it spreads across a canvas like a draught. These large graphic canvases have visual volume. They seem like snapshots of textiles caught in motion. Like British artist Bridget Riley’s 1960s explorations of the continuum between linearity and curves, Rastorfer's paintings in Meshworks are an exploration of linearity in disarray – a linearity affected by environmental stresses or ecological breakdown.
In an intensely physical painterly gesture each painting is combed into shape, each combing requiring a full bodily sweep. Like Jackson Pollock, Rastorfer works with the performative element and the viscosity of paint, the internal resistance of the substance to pressure or stress. Her process analysis defines each painting as taking around 22 steps. Step 11 reads “Prepare music, rags, water spray, water drink, squeegees, feet, singlet”. It’s the total-immersion school of painting.
Rastorfer is scientific in her approach. She researches her work intensely and records the various outcomes with careful written observations. Her understanding of the behavioural possibilities of paint is comprehensive. Like complexity scientists who explore the concept of emergence and self-organising principles in natural systems, Rastorfer looks for the dynamics within the paint medium, investigating the same process over and over again with small graduated differences exploring the permutations of possibility and chance. Paint is her biology.
Rastorfer employs the metallic and the iridescent in the mix so as to create possibilities of light capture and reflectivity. There is something akin to her process also in the work of Auckland artist Judy Millar. It’s action painting that deals with erasure and layers. There is a definite process of application layers and then movement layers. The success of the work is achieved in a flourish or otherwise sponged off and begun again. Rastorfer’s insists on constraint and the idea of the dissolving grid. For her each painting is the emergent variation of the one that preceded it. The same tools and technique are applied to each work. What differs is the colour and the gesture, the way the paint responds, the tonal variations, the texture. And within the larger patterning there are microfeatures such as pores, apertures, pits or slits on the surface.
Each painting is suggestible to ideas of unraveling metres of decaying shawls, or old matting, or ancient wedding trains. They are worn and dissolving, fibres breaking from wear and tear, broken strands, the elbows and toes always the first to go, the threads within threads that give way.
Yet as Merleau-Ponty has pointed out … “painting is an analogue or likeness only … it offers the gaze traces of vision from the inside, in order that it may espouse them…” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968)
And so the idea of these paintings as fabric is perhaps a setup and should be treated with caution. They might be better thought of as an interweaving. The canvas is an analogue scanner bed or a loom on which threads are suspended in tenuous linkages, compressing them into a 2-dimensional space. The paint works on two planes at cross currents. The spatial field in which the movement of paint is set is both flat and free of dimension. The painterly action is worked right to the surface. There is at its most basic a visual play between mass and ether. The interweaving of the visible and the intangible. The mass exists in streaming layers cut against the ether that in turn appears between the spaces and defines the mass. (Thrift, 2006)
In a recent artist statement Rastorfer writes, “I am intrigued by how some scientists have identified that organising principles can emerge at various levels of complexity and this can produce new laws and unforeseen qualities in systems. This anathema to reductionism suggests a new ecology of seeing: interwoven states, mutability and entanglement. “(Davies, 2005)
In this idea of interweaving between the tangible and the intangible are the more practical exigencies of weft, warp and weave that have ordered the materials of our existence forever. The idea of the overlapping vector, the grid, the loom, the architectural structure, the energy network: a mesh at its core has a kind of micro-patterning that could even be described as the blueprint of material manufacture.
A perfect cloth is the one that has equal curvature of warp and weft. Mesh is the industrial equivalent to cotton. The varying diameters of the wires woven together determine the aperture, the open area and the strength of the material. This work of overlap and tension provides the output of cohesion.
Because of that ability to weave together, the concept of mesh has become an organising principle in the context of social ecology. The pure aesthetics of the modernist grid have given way to the much more dynamic notion of mesh and networks as political counterspaces. Networks build connectivities that work transversally to traditional governance structures and can provide greater sense of cohesiveness within the social fabric. The idea of mesh supports overlap, tension and tensile strength.
In his essay The Search for Cohesion in the Age of Fragmentation Dr Don Beck writes:
“While "order" conveys the idea of closed systems and regimentation, the term "mesh" suggests a new form of social integration based on the weaving together of the rich textures of human differences and bindings of constant change. The concept of "mesh" carries with it the capacity to absorb the awesome complexities that now confront global people as we enter the next decade, century, and millennium.” (Beck, 1999)
When Rastorfer names her paintings ‘Mosque’, ‘Archipelago’ or ‘Ming’ she is locating her practice within a political global landscape, implying that shared material organising principles sustain the cultural materiality of different groupings and geographies.
Every cultural terrain is in a state of erosion and reinvention in today’s political environment. There is both a dissolving of traditional structures and the formation of new structures.
This is the layer of the social fabric (Brett, 2005) – the imbricated matrix of the social space where kinship, localities, loyalties, routines and rituals preside. Fabric as a social space, a network in which interweaving vectors represent the nexus of activity – represent it as a net, a catchment, a matrix of encounters. The burqa, the Pacific mat, and the Chinese silk are all cultural fabrics. Their persistence, reinforcing the subjectivities of cultural groupings, and binding cultures together, is a cohesive factor, yet even these intimate fabrics are subject to stresses, both political and environmental.
For artist Stuart Bradshaw, the sensuousness of painting rebels “against the containment of relevance”. Its agency lies within its lush optical counterposition to the literal. Within the outlaw elements of the medium, the ability to convey a relationship between the body and the world makes painting a cogently critical medium. Rastorfer’s paintings echo Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the trace as “something experienced by the body that can be externalized by the artist, an ‘inner form’ that is the result of a complex interlacing of body and world”.(Merleau-Ponty, 1968)
It’s the highly suggestible inner form that carries the pulse of cognition. In the paintings of Meshworks you can follow your eye along those streaming vectors into the slippage of visual pleasure. There is a corresponding cognitive surge as you are pulled into the play between the tangible and the intangible. In this painterly territory the notion of cohesion is building itself up and unraveling itself in an ever-unfolding visual incident.
Brett, D. (2005). Thresholds and Transitions. In Rethinking Decoration: Pleasure & Ideology in the Visual Arts (pp. Pages 88-89). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Davies, P. (2005). Emergence: The sum of the parts. New Scientist, March.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Beck, Don (1999). The Search for Cohesion in the Age of Fragmentation
Bradshaw, S. (2003)_Retrieved from http://www.humber.ac.uk/art/fineart/ptsection/ptpage.htm
Centre for Human Emergence. Retrieved 2007-11-08 from http://www.humanemergence.org/essays.html.
Thrift, N. (2006). Space. Theory, Culture & Society, 23 (2-3), 139-155.
Meshworks - the interweaving vectors of the body and the world in the paintings of Lorraine Rastorfer
by Jacquie Clarke
The movement of fabric in the wind is the most surface of the meanings invoked by the work of Wellington abstract painter Lorraine Rastorfer. The southern coastline where her studio and home is located takes the brunt of the Cook Strait tempest: the speed and volume of wind is measured in her daily journey past the wind socks of the airport, the tussock grasses on the beachfront, or the anti-gravitational play of items on washing-lines. South Wellington is also the place where she grew up. After many years both abroad and in Auckland, where she taught at the Manukau Institute of Technology, she has once again made it as her home and is now a Senior Lecturer in Visual Arts at WelTec.
In her painterly methodology Rastorfer has, with painstaking exactness, found a way to work paint so that it spreads across a canvas like a draught. These large graphic canvases have visual volume. They seem like snapshots of textiles caught in motion. Like British artist Bridget Riley’s 1960s explorations of the continuum between linearity and curves, Rastorfer's paintings in Meshworks are an exploration of linearity in disarray – a linearity affected by environmental stresses or ecological breakdown.
In an intensely physical painterly gesture each painting is combed into shape, each combing requiring a full bodily sweep. Like Jackson Pollock, Rastorfer works with the performative element and the viscosity of paint, the internal resistance of the substance to pressure or stress. Her process analysis defines each painting as taking around 22 steps. Step 11 reads “Prepare music, rags, water spray, water drink, squeegees, feet, singlet”. It’s the total-immersion school of painting.
Rastorfer is scientific in her approach. She researches her work intensely and records the various outcomes with careful written observations. Her understanding of the behavioural possibilities of paint is comprehensive. Like complexity scientists who explore the concept of emergence and self-organising principles in natural systems, Rastorfer looks for the dynamics within the paint medium, investigating the same process over and over again with small graduated differences exploring the permutations of possibility and chance. Paint is her biology.
Rastorfer employs the metallic and the iridescent in the mix so as to create possibilities of light capture and reflectivity. There is something akin to her process also in the work of Auckland artist Judy Millar. It’s action painting that deals with erasure and layers. There is a definite process of application layers and then movement layers. The success of the work is achieved in a flourish or otherwise sponged off and begun again. Rastorfer’s insists on constraint and the idea of the dissolving grid. For her each painting is the emergent variation of the one that preceded it. The same tools and technique are applied to each work. What differs is the colour and the gesture, the way the paint responds, the tonal variations, the texture. And within the larger patterning there are microfeatures such as pores, apertures, pits or slits on the surface.
Each painting is suggestible to ideas of unraveling metres of decaying shawls, or old matting, or ancient wedding trains. They are worn and dissolving, fibres breaking from wear and tear, broken strands, the elbows and toes always the first to go, the threads within threads that give way.
Yet as Merleau-Ponty has pointed out … “painting is an analogue or likeness only … it offers the gaze traces of vision from the inside, in order that it may espouse them…” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968)
And so the idea of these paintings as fabric is perhaps a setup and should be treated with caution. They might be better thought of as an interweaving. The canvas is an analogue scanner bed or a loom on which threads are suspended in tenuous linkages, compressing them into a 2-dimensional space. The paint works on two planes at cross currents. The spatial field in which the movement of paint is set is both flat and free of dimension. The painterly action is worked right to the surface. There is at its most basic a visual play between mass and ether. The interweaving of the visible and the intangible. The mass exists in streaming layers cut against the ether that in turn appears between the spaces and defines the mass. (Thrift, 2006)
In a recent artist statement Rastorfer writes, “I am intrigued by how some scientists have identified that organising principles can emerge at various levels of complexity and this can produce new laws and unforeseen qualities in systems. This anathema to reductionism suggests a new ecology of seeing: interwoven states, mutability and entanglement. “(Davies, 2005)
In this idea of interweaving between the tangible and the intangible are the more practical exigencies of weft, warp and weave that have ordered the materials of our existence forever. The idea of the overlapping vector, the grid, the loom, the architectural structure, the energy network: a mesh at its core has a kind of micro-patterning that could even be described as the blueprint of material manufacture.
A perfect cloth is the one that has equal curvature of warp and weft. Mesh is the industrial equivalent to cotton. The varying diameters of the wires woven together determine the aperture, the open area and the strength of the material. This work of overlap and tension provides the output of cohesion.
Because of that ability to weave together, the concept of mesh has become an organising principle in the context of social ecology. The pure aesthetics of the modernist grid have given way to the much more dynamic notion of mesh and networks as political counterspaces. Networks build connectivities that work transversally to traditional governance structures and can provide greater sense of cohesiveness within the social fabric. The idea of mesh supports overlap, tension and tensile strength.
In his essay The Search for Cohesion in the Age of Fragmentation Dr Don Beck writes:
“While "order" conveys the idea of closed systems and regimentation, the term "mesh" suggests a new form of social integration based on the weaving together of the rich textures of human differences and bindings of constant change. The concept of "mesh" carries with it the capacity to absorb the awesome complexities that now confront global people as we enter the next decade, century, and millennium.” (Beck, 1999)
When Rastorfer names her paintings ‘Mosque’, ‘Archipelago’ or ‘Ming’ she is locating her practice within a political global landscape, implying that shared material organising principles sustain the cultural materiality of different groupings and geographies.
Every cultural terrain is in a state of erosion and reinvention in today’s political environment. There is both a dissolving of traditional structures and the formation of new structures.
This is the layer of the social fabric (Brett, 2005) – the imbricated matrix of the social space where kinship, localities, loyalties, routines and rituals preside. Fabric as a social space, a network in which interweaving vectors represent the nexus of activity – represent it as a net, a catchment, a matrix of encounters. The burqa, the Pacific mat, and the Chinese silk are all cultural fabrics. Their persistence, reinforcing the subjectivities of cultural groupings, and binding cultures together, is a cohesive factor, yet even these intimate fabrics are subject to stresses, both political and environmental.
For artist Stuart Bradshaw, the sensuousness of painting rebels “against the containment of relevance”. Its agency lies within its lush optical counterposition to the literal. Within the outlaw elements of the medium, the ability to convey a relationship between the body and the world makes painting a cogently critical medium. Rastorfer’s paintings echo Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the trace as “something experienced by the body that can be externalized by the artist, an ‘inner form’ that is the result of a complex interlacing of body and world”.(Merleau-Ponty, 1968)
It’s the highly suggestible inner form that carries the pulse of cognition. In the paintings of Meshworks you can follow your eye along those streaming vectors into the slippage of visual pleasure. There is a corresponding cognitive surge as you are pulled into the play between the tangible and the intangible. In this painterly territory the notion of cohesion is building itself up and unraveling itself in an ever-unfolding visual incident.
Brett, D. (2005). Thresholds and Transitions. In Rethinking Decoration: Pleasure & Ideology in the Visual Arts (pp. Pages 88-89). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Davies, P. (2005). Emergence: The sum of the parts. New Scientist, March.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Beck, Don (1999). The Search for Cohesion in the Age of Fragmentation
Bradshaw, S. (2003)_Retrieved from http://www.humber.ac.uk/art/fineart/ptsection/ptpage.htm
Centre for Human Emergence. Retrieved 2007-11-08 from http://www.humanemergence.org/essays.html.
Thrift, N. (2006). Space. Theory, Culture & Society, 23 (2-3), 139-155.
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