Friday 19 July 2013

The relational origins of inter-media art in painting, interior design and picture framing: Pamela Gaunt’s Errant Abstractions

The relational origins of inter-media art in painting, interior design and picture framing: Pamela Gaunt’s Errant Abstractions. Richard Read 


Pamela Gaunt, Errant Florid Drawings, 2008, stencilled and painted industrially routed MDF, glue, etch primer and automotive paint, approx 2 x 1.5 m.


Abstract: This paper examines the conscious anachronism of traditional floral designs from Britain, Italy, India and Central Asia incorporated as basic modules in Pamela Gaunt’s installation Errant abstractions (2008). Starting with a phenomenological response to several kinds of fantasy that viewers might experience from interaction with the work, the essay goes on to establish a broad historical framework for the confluence of painting, interior design and frame-making in contemporary multimedia art and craft. This takes account of the developments that led to the inauguration of comfort and interior decoration as prerequisites of ordinary Western domestic life. In considering the varieties of social harmony that embellishment of privileged places afforded to owners, the essay takes two other factors into account. One is the role of art and decoration in increasing the immediacy of nature within buildings or abstracting it to a civilising distance from the world outside. The other is the role of anachronism (in Walter Benjamin’s sense) that modern hybrid works exploit when they re-enact the creative conflicts between painters, interior decorators and picture framers that once informed their necessary collaborations and now condition our variegated responses to the environments they created. Read complete paper here


Abstract from: The relational origins of inter-media art in painting, interior design and picture framing: Pamela Gaunt’s Errant Abstractions.

Full paper published in craft + design enquiry; Issue 4, 2012. Relational craft and design