Conversation Piece
A collaboration between artist Martina Šišková and photographer Jon C Archdeacon.
Text © Alice Browne
Photographs © Jon C Archdeacon
Martina and Jon asked Alice Browne: How do you use space in your work?
‘Space’ is such a small word and yet so malleable and varied. To begin to answer this question I need to walk us through a few thought-areas (some old, some new) and take up a bit of space to do so.
It all starts with Still Life
It took me many years of trying to painting and photographing objects - still life arrangements - before realising I was mainly interested in the areas of tension around the forms. The beautiful recess of a shadowed wall in a Juan Sanchez Cotan painting or the sharp, yet soft edge of a white tablecloth in a Pieter Claesz still life. The points at which the objects meet with these spatial limits, including the edge of the canvas frame were always key. The space inside of the forms were also important. The interior of a cup, for example, the shallow oval space created by a dish, the sunken eye socket space of a skull. The viewer feels these spaces without really needing to think about it, they are familiar. I love Norman Bryson’s book ‘Looking at the Overlooked’ (1990).
In the tradition of vanitas, the shadows of fragile lemon peel and teetering silver cutlery point to the physical presence of gravity and falling. The artists signature on a trompe l’oeil piece of paper reminds you that you’ve been fooled. But you liked it, no doubt. This is what I want: the drama of falling into an abyss with the wry humour of a pun.
Spatial Influencers
I found spatial conversations between painting and architecture through early Renaissance work seen in the National Gallery in London. Artists that played within this realm but worked in other mediums had a big influence on me - such as Phyllida Barlow and Gordon Matta-Clark. Visiting the ancient preserved ruins and frescos of Pompeii further embedded my interests in how art, location and ‘real' space are interconnected and introduced me to the powerful and historic significance that fresco and murals have.
In 2014 I experienced the artwork-installation ‘an Exhibit’ (1957) by Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore at the ICA in London - an arrangement of semi-transparent coloured panels which you moved through and around. It was like being IN a painting. Visiting Dia: Beacon museum in NY, USA and walking around Richard Serra’s work was overwhelming. The mixture of mass, texture, colour, nauseating scale, and time…I feel drunk just thinking about it. It’s like entering a parallel universe where nothing needs to make sense and my human scale is insignificant.
In Prunella Clough’s work I found the presence of object-space embedded in the textured painterly surface. Her work continues to remind me of the possibility of finding an unknowable but very active space through colour. Mary Heilmann taught me that paintings can dance…and that every form in a painting has a space behind it.
Painting Space/ Real Space
On the one hand I find myself thinking of the structure of space between layers of colour - around the forms that are entirely new and unique to the painting - and on the other hand there’s the visual manipulation available to the painter in the recreation of space that feels familiar, known: a horizon, a table edge, a screen.
I don’t aim to recreate a space that exists, or one that I’ve seen in a photograph. Every painting is a new spatial experiment, something to enter into and explore. It is a composite image built from my imagination, memory, dreams, photos, movies I’ve watched, artworks I’ve seen…even that bit of strange goo that oozes out of the brickwork, seen on the way to the studio (you know the one).
Experiencing space from the viewpoint of a human head is a strange and shifting thing so I’m always trying to communicate some of that in the work. There is never a perfect continuous perspective. Lines usually bend and waver, things fall in and out of focus. The real world is unreliable and uneven (as anyone who’s tried to hang a painting before knows). So there’s no need for space to be perfect in the world that my imagination inhabits. Additionally, as I have imperfect vision which needs to be corrected with lenses, I’m acutely aware of how malleable my visual experience is. Every raindrop changes my world entirely.
I enjoy playing with contrasting image-layers, for example imagine you find a piece of paper and feel compelled to quickly draw on it. You pin it next to a photo of your favourite mountain range and then look out of the window at the trees and think about what you dreamt last night…I want to manoeuvre between these spaces (which space does the dream take place in?). I think about this particularly when i’m making larger works which have more of a tendency to point to spaces outside of themselves as well as within.
Symbolic Space
Recently I’ve become further drawn to thinking about forms and spaces in symbolic ways and how something breaking down can release imaginative potential. A puddle becomes a wishing well, a crack in the pavement perhaps portents bad luck, a gap in a floorboard is a portal to another world. Enduring human technologies, such as glass, rope, paper and plank are transformed through fragmentation, no longer useful for the purpose which they were created for. They navigate through the mysterious space that we may call the ‘away’. They take on new collaborative existences in non-human spaces and re-emerge, dredged from lakes, washed up on beaches, caught up in bushes. I notice these openings, lacunas, cracks and dysfunctional objects and photograph them. I recently made a photographic textile work for an exhibition at OUTPOST Gallery in Norwich (‘With in P/lane’, 2025) which is a combination of print, object and painting layered in my studio and captured in a single photo. The source images are of the cracked, blue-painted cycle lane near my studio and the splitting bark of London plane trees near my home. Exploring some of the playful, spatial and illusionistic freedoms of painting in conjunction with other mediums is an enduring pursuit.
Final Thoughts/ Spaces in History
When we add a form to a space, we create a space behind, but how much space is there? I’m curious to think about the potential in these spaces, how much depth can I suggest between things in a painted or photographed surface? Is the mass of space linear and rational, or could it respond to some other set of physical laws, governed by other worlds, or the anti-gravity of space? What if, like the surface of the canvas itself, it is a woven tapestry with pockets of space which can be stuffed or prised open? Can I tear a hole from one world into another?
Being able to imagine other possible structures of space extends beyond the making of artworks.
I think about the possibility of time and therefore history being like a porous, woven surface. There are many unexplored pockets and blindspots yet to uncover and passages yet to be created. In this way history and indeed our futures are endlessly changing forms full of imaginative potential. This lack of fixity, like Heilmann’s dancing squares, is what I strive to create space for.
Alice's work is currently on show (until 29th June 2025). ‘Insided’ at OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich, UK.
An exhibition by Binder of Women including Gabriela Giroletti, Lauren Godfrey and Pia Pack.
Text © Alice Browne
Photographs © Jon C Archdeacon