Disorder
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Exhibition Statement
Lindy Fyfe is an artist whose work follows upon certain traditions established in the modern period, while also fitting within postmodernism. What does that mean? Within modernism, her drawings and paintings are rooted in what is generally known as “abstraction”. That is, they convey meaning that depends on essential form discovered through imagination and invention rather than describing what is merely visible. They do not provide the viewer with an illusion of “reality”; there is no sense that in those works we are looking at things we can easily recognize from our own experience in the world. Rather, it is her experience we see, shaped by her own personal intuition as it looks for and finds lines, shapes, and colour combinations that give form to what her imagination needs to express.
For Fyfe the real world of experience is the beginning, and the means, not the end. In all of her work one can see the influence of calligraphy, which she practiced professionally for several years. She has an unusually articulate way with line and composition and a natural facility for making significance speak boldly from design. These qualities are particularly evident in her stretched fabric works, and they bring us to how we understand something of the postmodern in her practice.
More typical postmodern art seems to require quite a lot of theory for its basis, but this is not so with Fyfe. The ways she has revisited and reinvented certain approaches and styles of earlier modernism is at the centre of how she is postmodern. Optical art, for example, in the sixties was part of the modern search for a purity of experience, suggesting it might be found in the physical aftereffects of pattern and colour and through perceptual effects. “Op Art” paintings were made of patterned colours that appeared to produce colours and even motion that were not really there. They are difficult for the eye to look at and the brain to process, causing some illusory colour and vibrations. But Fyfe goes well beyond retinal tricks in her patterned fabric work and also beyond the typical exploration of fabric in modernism. Hers is a kind of accidental, purely intuition-motivated trial of earlier strategies that are exuberantly and unselfconsciously appropriated for her own expressive means. They are unique and so they are original in expressive voice for the artist and new in pure experience for the viewer.
- David Aurandt
For Fyfe the real world of experience is the beginning, and the means, not the end. In all of her work one can see the influence of calligraphy, which she practiced professionally for several years. She has an unusually articulate way with line and composition and a natural facility for making significance speak boldly from design. These qualities are particularly evident in her stretched fabric works, and they bring us to how we understand something of the postmodern in her practice.
More typical postmodern art seems to require quite a lot of theory for its basis, but this is not so with Fyfe. The ways she has revisited and reinvented certain approaches and styles of earlier modernism is at the centre of how she is postmodern. Optical art, for example, in the sixties was part of the modern search for a purity of experience, suggesting it might be found in the physical aftereffects of pattern and colour and through perceptual effects. “Op Art” paintings were made of patterned colours that appeared to produce colours and even motion that were not really there. They are difficult for the eye to look at and the brain to process, causing some illusory colour and vibrations. But Fyfe goes well beyond retinal tricks in her patterned fabric work and also beyond the typical exploration of fabric in modernism. Hers is a kind of accidental, purely intuition-motivated trial of earlier strategies that are exuberantly and unselfconsciously appropriated for her own expressive means. They are unique and so they are original in expressive voice for the artist and new in pure experience for the viewer.
- David Aurandt
Press
Review on Akimblog