Moyra Derby’s room plan April-May 2022
The works installed at Studio 3 Gallery were in progress.
A series of painting based components configure as a room plan, actualising and imagining space for both a painter and a mathematician. Wall and floor based structures, and space responsive wall works have a shared set of measurements, ratios and compositional strategies. Their status as paintings is interchangeable with their potential as tables, shelves, screens and storage, or their readability as a number system or mathematical diagrams.
The component based nature of the work allows it to adapt to the space and also make space, and in its pictorial qualities to be space depictive. Some elements can be moved and repositioned by visitors, sharing compositional discovery and adjustment, and moving the work between process, display and storage.
As a visualisation and a proposition, ‘room plan’ confers with the history of painting and its pictorial and diagrammatic potentials. Picture and diagram both indicate forms of image that are derived from or overlaid onto another, or that prescribe or prompt a set of actions or associations. In this sense ‘room plan’ both pictures and proposes an approach to painting that is provisional and interdependent. The components operate within the idea of an open work, with indecision and incompleteness offered as an expansively generative space for thinking and making.
Virginia Woolf described the need for a room of one’s own, and here that room is understood as a cognitive space as much as a physical space. The fluctuating and episodic experiences of attention are called upon, inviting attentional attachments that are externally reactive and internally reflective. From moments of extreme focus to the pulls of distraction and the scattering of dispersed attention. The components of ‘room plan’ are approached as attentional co-ordinates that anticipate and reciprocate the spatial and imaginative participation of the gallery visitor.