Zinc blue stretch, aquamarine dream. How is it I can spin and be entirely still? My hands and each mark score arduously against the metal, warming my palm. Lifting weight though swimming lightly. A human imagination.
The brushing sound in a bizarre arrangement. The roof floats above without knowing. Consciously arranged, slowly pouring away, rip and hit, whirred. The personality of a handle. Only the new leaves move with the breeze when meeting. Sun-bleached floral bedsheet blind. Heat-treated to harden the steel. Wedges in wood. Shock-resistant grip impressions snap and gliding scraper. Playful assertion fits its way through remnants of my wrist and mind. A house painter as she descends a ladder. Forged domesticity and awakening.
Persisting anyway, big brush glide and scuff. The complication sits as I please and the saws see each other, standing upright. I’ve made something that looks back at me. Thought as drawing edge and ridges, organic synthetic manufactured freeform. Softness and shadow reflecting itself, the edge. Blades and armour, symmetrical swathe.
Blue-edged growth. My idea and the time bent into line, off-balance. The answer weaves itself in like some cryptic relative. The noise, hit, silence in the garden. Daylight shifting peach, scrape and glide. Sculpted hammer head. Anthropomorphic inkling. Fallen leaves suspend like a mosaiced path in my mind, holding hands with a solution. Daylight reveals a courtyard, its hedges below knee height.
Hit, knock with intention. Rhythm and light reveal themselves to me, alive and vibrant, reflecting. The form and its buzz are indistinguishable. Knotted trunk. Tools that extend my hand. The road beside me is coral in colour. Painting life as growing and changing shapes, active force. Unabashed cherry red, summer storm sky grey. Phthalo.
Mimicking contours tell their own fibs. Twigs extend and contract. Each movement is a sound recorded and becomes lines and marks in paint. She’s thinking through line. What is there holds the same strength as the thing that frames it, then holds up my thought. Presenting something upright then diverting it. A path, a trunk, a nail. Scoring a saw blade, metal sheen, bumpy bark. The paintings are the process, the rhyme, and a solution. Handled potential, handheld labour. A painting’s edges restrained, erased and delicate concrete glass. Life, immediacy, and a rose garden. Undoing in scrape and undone brush scuff. An emotional climate towards a subconscious telling.
– Madeline Simm, September 2022
