Exhibition Statement

Shiny objects threaten to tip and tumble as they reflect intricate patterns, flowers and fruit as well as revealing the distorted interiors in which they were painted and occasional self-portraits.

These paintings grew from the pandemic lockdowns of the last few years when I returned to still life, making compositions with a few favourite objects. They developed into staged compositions where I played with unstable juxtapositions of shiny things, pushing them to their tipping point and reflecting my feelings about the chaos and uncertainty around us.

Exhibition Essay

In this world of utility. There is no avoiding reality, no way of escaping it, for the sole purpose of these objects is to serve people’s needs. But to think of them as nothing but physical objects would be an error - Soetsu Yanagi

When I first encountered Margaret Ackland’s work, I was taken aback by the scale and animation. Sometimes almost as tall as the artist, the watercolours are lively and expansive. Full of activity and agitation, they are neither spare, nor austere, catching me in bustling movement and pattern.

Objects witness us, says Ackland, as she sits at her studio desk. It was during lockdown she recounts, when time and mobility slowed down that she began to take a closer look at the stillness of things around the house.“I’ve always been completely entranced and interested in the visible world, and looking at things” she reflects. Silently present, Ackland understood that the objects we hold near are witness to our living. Interested in this witnessing, in the gaze and the reflections that bounce back, she developed the new body of work Tipping Point.

Instability and pattern create tension in the paintings. Recasting the conventions of the still life genre, the carefully arranged teapots, vases, and other everyday objects — typical to still life — are on the brink of falling. Caught this moment of instability, Ackland’s subjects emerge unsteadily in peril. Yet wavering on the edge, at their tipping point, there is a balance found in the orderly repetition and rhythm of patterned fabric.

The classic Toile textile appears across multiple works. A type of fabric originating from France, Toile traditionally depicts idyllic pastoral or rural scenes in ornate pat- tern. In a classical French kind of way, the cloth holds feelings of country romance and nostalgia.

Ackland’s Toile mime the romantic classic, yet taking a closer look you may notice a slight twist. Symbols and images from modern news and current events hide in certain detail. Looking for the code, I am captivated by a comforting hum of floral silhouettes. I think about the media cycle, repetition, newspapers, print and what it means to witness.

Without question, there is something miraculous in Ackland’s technical ability of rendering watercolour into the reflective materiality of the metal and glass subjects. Passing through thin layers of colour, light bounces off the white paper background. The effect is a desirous translucency distinct to the process and medium. Yet the delicacy of a watercolour also lends itself to an unforgiving quality. Unlike other mediums such as oil or acrylic, there is a lack of plasticity in the paint. Once a mark is made, it is difficult to erase or remove. Negotiating this character, the fragility of the paper, and pigment suspended in the movement of water demands a degree of patience that discerns a sensitivity within the unsteady compositions. Such precision is irrevocably enchanting.

The works in Tipping Point capture quiet moments of watching, between the artist and her objects, as the chaos and madness of the pandemic transpired. Sometimes, distorted within the curvature of a reflective surface, is a face appearing to hold a mobile phone. Warped, flipped or multiplied, it is in fact an obscured image of Ackland herself. These paintings are thus not only still life compositions, but also portraits. The object’s gaze is witness to Ackland, as she is witness to them, and we begin to see Ackland on a different, tilted plane. We see her face and body pulled and altered as it looks back at us. She is observing and being observed. Held together by the balance of patterned fabric, the gaze is cyclical, feeding back into itself. Deftly painting herself into the still-life, Ackland reflects on the perspective of the objects that we hold close and how they in turn hold us — until the very edge.

Claire de Carteret
Writer/Curator

Margaret Ackland, Bridge, 2023, Watercolour on paper, 97 x 104 cm artwork, 1120 x 124 cm framed, Photo Ian Hobbs