SHEILA WALLIS

A series of drawings and paintings begun during the Covid19 UK lockdown in 2019, which explore the extent to which the history of an interior might be insinuated in the pared back geometries revealed during the initial stages of renovation.

I have an enduring love of watercolour painting. It seeps and stains across paper in beautiful, unpredictable ways. As I started my series of boxer’s heads back in 2006, I was struck by how unlikely a choice this ‘genteel’ medium might seem in the depiction of violence, pain and struggle. The young men I grew up around in Derry were attracted to boxing, as is traditionally the case in working-class communities.

All images in this series are gifted to The Donkey Sanctuary in perpetuity.

‘’a painting made from a selected film-still might begin to hint at the possibility of an alternative narrative, one that isn’t actually chronicled in the film itself’’. Sheila Wallis

If it is something of a truism that the artist invites the audience to reassess subjects that are - for one reason or another - overlooked or disregarded, then bereavement and mourning must surely qualify for attention. And this is the context in which I propose that a reconsideration of Victorian post-mortem photography is critically important.
It is not always apparent to the casual observer that the subjects in Victorian post mortem photographs are dead and not simply asleep. In a curiously synchronistic comment, Marlene Dumas observes ‘Images don’t care. Images do not discriminate between sleep and death’. (Shiff 2008.147)

In the search to uncover and explore possible new meanings within the post-mortem photograph, I find the need to re-photograph the photograph (requiring movement on my part as I press the shutter) before I can begin to consider how its subject matter – originally taken at a point when grief must have predominated over mourning - might be translated into another medium. And not just another material medium. The translation must also begin to speak of the redemptive power of mourning, testifying to the extent that art addresses its subject in the context of multiple legibility. Re-photography permits a search for something that I believe to be latent - unfulfilled - in the image. It gives back to photography that which belongs to it - a ‘rendering unto Caesar’ as it were, of its own visual currency, back to the methodological authority to which it properly belongs, according to its own conditions and under its own terms. Re-photography is the visual trope that permits me to draw out more explicitly the trembling – shuddering? – of the living subjects as they wait out the exposure time whilst propping and supporting their deceased relative. Re-photography appears to propel the ‘original’ image into a new, unpredictable dimensionality, creating a heightened sense of presence that migrates into my drawn or painted transcriptions.

Extract from Transfiguring Bereavement, Sheila Wallis, 2014

oil on oak panel

7 x 9 inches

2022

‘Hanter-nos’ is the Cornish word for midnight, the time at which, on the 12th April 1912, the sailing vessel Mildred ran aground in dense fog off Gurnard’s Head in Cornwall. My painting is a transcription from a remarkable photograph of the wreck in the Gibson and Sons of Scilly Collection, now held at the Royal Museums Greenwich.

In these historic archival images, the Gibson’s were primarily concerned with straightforward photojournalism. In our own time many of their maritime images might be perceived as hinting at the unquiet and insecure relationship that we increasingly often recognise in our own relationship with the natural world. This is the metaphor that I set out to explore in a painting that employs the ossified colours, tones and textures of scrimshaw in making a painting of a doomed vessel that happened to be loaded with coal slag. Happily, no lives were lost in this grounding, the fog being heavy but the sea remaining calm enough for the captain and crew to escape safely. So despite the apparently desolate scene, I trust that a suggestion of hope might remain in a painting that treats the perilous relationship we have with our climate.