The Dancer and the Dance

The Paintings of Pam Harris

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance
How can we tell the dancer from the dance?[1]

There isn’t a person among us who hasn’t asked serious questions at some point about the great mysteries of existence. What does it mean to be? What is our relationship to the universe? Is there a world order? What is time?   For most, it is probably fair to say that, not finding easy answers to those imponderables, we turn instead to more immediate concerns and gradually become so distracted with the minutiae of family, social and political life that those philosophical issues are left to one side or submerged into collective religious or philosophical beliefs, accepted rather than challenged. The soul-searching questions are best left to priests, scientists, poets or children. Pam Harris is someone for whom there is no escape from those questions but her attempts to find answers ultimately follow an aesthetic rather than a religious or scientific direction.

A self-taught artist she has used painting and drawing, consistently,  sometimes doggedly,  to help her to find meaning and order in the world around her and to explain her own part within it. She would not be the first artist to do this but not many artists will have tried to give visual form to those questions and to resolve philosophical and scientific/ empirical problems through painting. 

Pam Harris is a painter and a Modernist. From her particular point in history she calls on Minimalism and abstraction to define and explore her modes of enquiry. A highly informed background in music and contemporary dance developed her sense of discipline and also her grasp of spatial and temporal qualities. Her visual motifs, the square, the grid, the line, almost always in the form of a vertical or horizontal stripe, are archetypal. 

There is a seamless progression running through her paintings. From her earliest exhibitions in the Lincoln Galleries in the 1980s through to her more recent solo shows at the Ashford Gallery and now at Hillsborough Fine Art she has worked through a structured series of questions that are normally the domain of physicists and philosophers. In one of these, Lightgrass from the Passage series at the Lincoln Gallery in 1986 she proposed a series of plumb lines to the inner self that enabled a grand view of time; past, present and future (Fig. 1). The painterliness of this body of work gained her positive reviews then but instead of wooing her already well-disposed critics she went on to irritate her most consistent critical supporter, Brian Fallon of the Irish Times, by seeming to switch styles. Fallon was to accuse her of doing this a number of times over the next couple of years although he continued to appreciate her handling of paint. It’s not unusual for an artist, early in her career to try out different voices before settling on the one that fits most comfortably, and it is unlikely that anyone would make this criticism of Harris’s work since the early 90s. The stylistic evolution that Fallon noted, may, at first, have disguised her unwavering dedication to those philosophical questions. The inward gaze in Lightgrass prompted her to ask herself how she connected with the wider, cosmic world. The question is ultimately a romantic one but Harris’s thought process and the classical exercises she set herself to explore it separate her from the Romantics emphasis on the individual. In the series of groups of works that followed that 1986 show questions such as what is the relationship between the self and the universe, between subject and object, between opposing but equal forces, between binary opposites and the excluded matter in between, are investigated with an energy, that derives its strength from her very minimal means.

All artists have a distinctive iconography, for some this is highly personal while for others it is often very close to the minutiae of contemporary life. Pam Harris’s iconography is archetypal and abstract. Apart from very occasional forays into figurative reference, such as the series Headworks from the early 90s and The Blue Guitar- she confines herself to variations on a very limited number of motifs which she employs in a highly structured and logical way. The greater universe is always represented by a square, usually painted grey to suggest distance and its consequent blurring of particulars such as surface detail and local colour. The Square divided into 4 separate quarters represents the forces of quantam mechanics; gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces.. A red square represents the human presence. Horizontal lines or stripes represent history, or linear time; reading from left to right that allows for past and present and points to the future. Vertical lines, on the other hand allude to eternity while the point of intersection between these two becomes a point of dynamic tension. The relationships between the motifs on the surface of the painting are repeated around all four sides indicating that everything exists in a spatial and temporal continuum. The surface plane is as much a bearer of meaning as the motifs it carries. Thus a raised square or grid on the surface represents a groping  attempt to represent a extra dimension of time, not to be equated with historic time or with the concept f eternity.. Mention has already been made to the symbolic use of red and grey but the polar opposites of black and white are given their full significance in paintings such as Barrier 1 from 1997, (Fig 2). Here parallel bands of black and white represent the mutual attraction and hostility of equal and opposite forces,  light and dark, good and evil. As such they are going nowhere and require separation by some other force in order to allow for change.  All of this sounds highly formulaic and is at odds with the marks of individuality that we have come to expect from artists. It would be very dull were it not for the artist’s colour sense and her subtle application of paint and the formal relationships within the work. The one thing that all the critics of Harris’s work agree on is her painterliness. The handling of paint, sometimes smooth, sometimes given a looser treatment, is as meaningful to the totality as the symbolism described above.

There is a cliché in impoverished, contemporary thought that claims that different thought patterns and ideas emerge from different sides of the brain, that scientific thought, based on empirical research, is located in one side of the brain, together with the means of enquiry that support it while the mental processes that govern artistic creativity reside very firmly on the opposite side. That this is a relatively recent view of the brain is evident from a look backward into history towards, for example the Italian Renaissance, when intellectuals such as Alberti and Leonardo could excel as architects, artists, writers, poets, scientists, philosophers in the morning and still discourse learnedly on the harmony of the spheres or the most recent Neo-Platonist theory in the evening. They were unique only in the degree of excellence that they displayed in each of these fields of endeavour.  Pam Harris is fully cognizant of the creative and imaginative energies that lead to such advances in modern scientific thought as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. She acknowledges a huge debt to the Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrödinger who gave a series of lectures “What is Life? (Trinity College Dublin, 1943) and Mind and Matter (Trinity College, Cambridge, 1956)[2] She is not the only Irish artist to cite Shrödinger. Louis le Brocquy has given public testimony to his admiration for the scientist on many occasions. Both Harris and Le Brocquy look to Schrödinger’s theories of Being, but curiously in profoundly different ways. Le Brocquy’s concern from the outset has been to explain what it is to exist as individuals, to explore the essence of human individuality, Harris on the other hand looks to the relationship between the human and the cosmos and finds in Schrödinger’s theoretical writing the closest equivalent to what she aims to achieve in her painting and in her life.

Schrödinger believes that everything in the universe is united in one common material essence. Mankind, like other aspects of that world order, is just another manifestation of this, made ultimately from the same particles of matter as the stars. The  sense of separateness that some people have, of being ‘non-concerned observers’, is, in Schrödinger’s view, illusory and misleading and results from an imaginary attempt to stand back from the universe or from linear time in order to try to make sense of it. The small inserted canvases that Harris incorporates into her paintings are sometimes raised subtly about the level of the larger picture plane to suggest this apparent aloofness. The fact that these areas form parts of the larger whole, and often continue surrounding motifs from the larger canvas symbolises their connectedness to the bigger picture. Schrödinger’s conviction that “subject and object are only one”[3] has become a kind of mantra for Pam Harris. Creatively this also means that the creator/ artist/ performer cannot be separated from the object of their creativity. Like the Renaissance thinkers cited earlier Harris is as open to other creative ways of exploring these ideas.as she is to Schrödinger’s or Einstein’s. Wallace Steven’s long poem, The Man with the Blue Guitar [4]argues for just this fusion of musician, instrument and song. Harris based a whole sequence of paintings on Steven’s poem in 1994 (The Blue Guitar, No 5. Fig 3).  T.S. Elliot’s conflation of time in The Four Quartets offers another powerful stimulus for her exploratory thinking.

Since Harris is self-taught as a painter she did not have the exposure to art history and theory that most art school graduates take for granted. Unaware of the theoretical writings of Paul Klee, she was instinctively drawn to Klee’s use of the grid and his layering of colour and form to encapsulate the unified organic development of his universe. Barnet Newman is another artist to whom, not surprisingly, Harris acknowledges a debt. But it is to Agnes Martin and finally to Sean Scully that she accords the greatest influence on her own development. Harris’s work has frequently been compared to Scully’s and this is bound to be problematic for both artists. It is not merely their use of the stripe as a primary bearer of meaning that links them superficially, since neither was aware of the other when they embarked on their own particular use of the motif. Harris unhesitatingly refers to her first encounter with a Scully painting within a painting as her ‘Eureka moment’. For some time she had been trying to find a way to show that everything in the universe is essentially united in each single manifestation of it. The insert was the perfect solution to her search. 

The paintings speak for themselves. Of course it is not necessary to have read Einstein or even Schrödinger to be immediately drawn to them. They have to and do work first as objects to engage the viewer through the senses. The archetypal forms and proportions that proved seductive to the Ancient Greeks and Palladio continue to work their unconscious magic. When they are re-presented by an artist whose sensitivity to colour harmony is fused with total understanding of the power of the brushstroke, either softened or hard-edged, then the cocktail is irresistible. Painting on a modest scale,   a defining point of divergence between herself and Sean Scully, Harris also introduces other media into her work. The Passage series includes work in which she incorporated tinfoil on to the canvas, which when glimpsed through the paint, allows a measure of reflection that incorporated the viewer into the thing viewed. Subject is contained in the object. Tinfoil gives way to lead in the later works, tiny strips of lead inserted into the canvas to symbolize truth and humility. In Union Painting no 1, 1997, (fig 4) a thin line from left to right, suggestive of linear time, is paralleled with a series of stripes of the same colour that break up the grey background. A smaller square insert, of similar stripes on a subtly different scale, suggests the focal point of our gaze, magnified by our scrutiny, but ultimately contained within the whole. Most of the paintings share a grey background, the universe, on which the smaller details of history surface. This is true of all the paintings from The Planet series in which each of the major planets is represented by an insert, whose colour, surface texture, shape and orientation all allude to the principal qualities of that planet (Uranus, fig no 5). A series that breaks with this overarching principle is A Part from 2004. . In A Part, Union Painting no 21 (fig.6 ) the stripes are the vertical lines of eternity. A square insert continues the surrounding motifs but is placed slightly off centre, and the lines are softened and blurred to suggest a closer, more personalized presence, that is nevertheless subordinated to the more rigid laws governing the field within which it sits.

In the final analysis what distinguishes Pam Harris’s paintings from those artists, such as Scully and Martin that she admires is this search for universal order. For all their apparent and very real differences, in terms of scale, use of colour and material, both Sean Scully and Agnes Martin are concerned with the plight of the individual, in Martin’s case with the doggedness and persistence necessary for personal survival, in Scully’s with expressing the power of emotional and even biological energies.  Pam Harris’s work takes her on a more isolated journey, not so much committed to finding a place in society .– to winning friends and influencing people, as to finding a place in the universe, something too big for most of us to comprehend, most of the time. It is not about the individual self – more about self as a part of the whole, something that conforms to a universal order that is beyond our control and even our comprehension. Instead of celebrating Man’s place it courageously acknowledges his humble status in the greater scheme of things. It is cerebral rather than intuitive and looks to science as well as to the arts. It is ultimately positive compared to the romantics, since it sets aside a pre-dominantly tragic position for a rational one.  Harmony comes from acceptance of our lowly place in the wider cosmic scheme of things 

The paradox is that for all the scientific laws explored in these paintings it is as works of art that they prove their point. If they did not satisfy the artist’s lofty aesthetic criteria they would also fail to prove the scientific principles.

Catherine Marshall

February 2006

 Catherine Marshall is an Art Historian. She is Senior Curator; Head of Exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

[1]William Butler Yeats, Among School Children, need to get details of book and date.
[2] Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? & Mind and Matter,  Cambridge University Press, 1967
[3] Op cit p. 137
[4] Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1937.