'On the Said and the Unsayable,' Amy Marguerite

On the Said and the Unsayable: Exhibition Text for the pram in the hallway by Amy Marguerite

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“I will try to explain this” – The Shaving of The Head

If there were a swing bridge, an exposed ligament, between the said and the unsayable, at its nebulous centre would stand mother and daughter, Frances Krsinich and Kata Brown. The rope would be worn and the wind would arrive spasmodically in the shade of a blanched groan. With each sign of imminent sway, the daughter would fasten all five fingers around her mother’s pinkie, call it a question mark. Here?

Feet on the dot. Feet on the goddamn dot.

Fluid yet imploring interruption, whimsical yet entirely controlled, the pram in the hallway is reminiscent of a lucid dream and its aftermath. It is the nature of a dream to see its content remarkably changed by daylight: words are left to dangle at the hand of meaning, landscapes overflow with associative debris, and desire is filtered through—regardless of its possible dream-fulfilment—with a sense of melancholy. The longing depicted by the pram in the hallway is unafraid and unashamed of its propensity for disfiguration, both Krsinich and Brown acknowledging in their works the limits of expression and its delivery.

“Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.” — Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”

My first encounter with this exhibition possessed the quality of a lullaby, the generous dispersion of works around the gallery arousing feelings of cloud-like airiness, or spaced-outness, and reassuring intimacy. It was no surprise then to open the artists’ zine to the lines: “This will be (she believes) / A loaded and ambiguous act of vulnerability between mother / and / daughter.” What is a lucid dream, a lullaby, but a loaded and ambiguous act?

As I began to wander and wonder in my wandering, I noticed I was experiencing an overwhelming urge to sit on the floor. I found a slab of bottom-numbing concrete and threw my fur jacket over my legs for warmth. Here I felt like a fledgling in a foreign nest, a fledgling with a worm’s-eye view of this mother-daughter relationship, and this felt immediately right. I couldn’t reach too much for anything here and that felt right.

Longing.

My initial thought gathered from a craned neck survey of the room involved the proportional harshness and softness of the art. There is a harshness about the way each individual work is contained and containable by its rectangular frame (the television included) and there is a softness about the majority’s interior complexion, Note Series (1) and Note Series (2) in particular engaging a muted palette. This observation extends further to the composition of Note Series, namely the bold lettering foregrounding the abovementioned muted palette. Belonging to this handwritten text is a sense of the daughter’s striving, overcompensating, overexertion; words desperately want to speak for and by themselves but alas, they cannot, will not. And then there is the added element of the strikethrough in Note Series (2), the violent spurts of scribble present in the daughter’s note to her mother (or is it an unsent letter, a first and final draft kept private in, say, the daughter’s diary?) which at once indicate a recognition of these repeated words’ futility and their potential for immense, and in this case hurtful, impact. Moreover, the absence of concrete imagery in Brown’s Note Series supports this notion that words must be self-evident, the only piece suggesting otherwise being Brown’s canvas painting, I Hate Mum. Not only does this painting incorporate illustration but the black lettering customarily used by the daughter also assumes a grey tinge. This modification speaks quiet volumes, the seeping of the daughter’s semantically and visually harsh words into the comparably tender background marking a shift from separation to togetherness. Such progression, however, does not assume a gale force presence on this canvas; moments of intimacy, of recognised relationship, are dispersed ever so subtly across works. The daughter’s “Do you like this Picture?” note, for instance, opens with “To Mum” and is signed off with a decided “love fum” (“fum” as a gorgeous misspelling of “from”). This differs from the message of Note Series (2) wherein the daughter fails to directly address her mother and omits the closing “love”, ending her message instead—though there is arguably no definitive ending—with a repeated, reluctant and singular “from”. Additionally, Note Series (1) includes a perfectly ephemeral moment of dialogue between mother and daughter, the mother exclaiming “yes!” in response to her daughter’s question.

Here.

The multimodal constitution of Brown’s Note Series and I Hate Mum reifies the daughter’s grasp of the maternal relationship, as necessarily and unremittingly developed through experimentation. The act of communicating a harsh truth—or plea for recognition—from a place of fragile yet unfailing love is complex and requires, on behalf of the child, an instinctive playfulness. While the insufficiency of language to accurately externalise feeling might be a mainspring of frustration, it is nonetheless a playground for the child to leap at, fall on, return to time and again.

The 4 x 5 painting collection, an appropriately untitled collaboration between Brown and Krsinich, stands apart from the aforementioned works by way of its wordlessness, the roles and experience of mother and daughter revealed exclusively through the unsaid, through visual documentation and representation. It was wildly fitting that an earthquake struck just as I began to engage with these paintings, and even more fitting still was the way I—far too confidently—put the shaking down to construction. At first glance the collaborative nature of this collection implies a closeness between mother and daughter, and while this isn’t an erroneous assumption, an outermost display of a mother bird feeding her fledgling is capable of occluding refusal. In spite of the proximity between mother and daughter assuming a hopeful compression, tension persists.

The same harshness and softness present in Note Series manifests in this collection, across works: the muted palette is applied by Brown and for the most part avoided by Krsinich, and the sinuous quality belonging to Brown’s contribution is incongruous with Krsinich’s sustained, lattice-like compositions. While Brown focalises the mother-daughter relationship through the body, her paintings almost a non-consecutive storyboard of events and feelings, Krsinich employs abstraction. What I find particularly fascinating about Brown’s contribution is the depiction of pregnancy, the documentation of an experience unbeknownst to the child. Whether the daughter has imagined, dreamed, or been provided an account of this experience is ambiguous, unsaid, and the same rings true of the paintings portraying the newborn. In any case, the prioritisation of showing over telling, softness over harshness, implies a new maturity, the daughter no longer resorting to language—straining for language—as a means of connection. Moreover, Brown’s painting of the woman holding an apple to her chest possesses a similar ambiguity: is this the young mother, or daughter, or both? Could this be the nebulous centre, the unfastening of fingers?

Hand to heart. Hand to pounding heart.

Although Krsinich’s paintings exude rigidity, uniformity, and detachment from Brown’s pictorial perspective, their braided appearance and undertones of softness arguably point to communion. Here, as in I Hate Mum, tension is neither resisted nor immune to collapse. Leaking through Krsinich’s seemingly intransigent, sanguine palette is a vaporous blue-grey, each painting thus giving the impression of precipitation on a window, or perhaps, even, the daughter peering through panes. While Krsinich may have intended for this crosshatch pattern to signal relationship and its inescapable friction, when considering the exhibition as a whole the intersection of palettes sees the most profound intimacy.

On this account, it comes as no great shock that two of the four collaborative paintings present a melding of approaches, both pieces recalling Krsinich’s sanguine palette, Brown’s muted palette and corporeal fixation. The resonance, however, of these features derives almost exclusively from their interplay, the slight alterations made by mother and daughter out of mutual recognition occasioning a beautifully mindful conversation. The hollows—or panes—included by Krsinich in her solo contribution are, in these collaborative paintings, filled in with colour, and more, they are surrounded by a baby blue attributable to the daughter. The saturation of this blue when compared with the muted blues of Note Series signals a new strength of presence; the daughter is undeniably seen.

The final works comprising the pram in the hallway include a collaborative short film, The Dream, and two accompanying photographic pieces. The Dream observes mother and daughter in a lush outdoor setting, the mother seated on a chair and the grown daughter stood behind her, an electric razor in one hand. The mother is dressed in periwinkle blue and the daughter a deep red. Once again we witness these signature palettes in close proximity, except this time, for the first time, their association is defined by their reversal. The grown daughter’s adoption of the mother’s bold red palette in addition to her dominant upright posture sees this relationship assume a new dynamic, one characterised by the daughter’s power and mother’s vulnerability. That said, the new dynamic does not do away with the old one; just as there is an underlying tension belonging to the collaborative painting collection, there is a tension about these fresh attributions of power and vulnerability, neither quality capable of exerting its individual force without some interruption, or intervention, from the “oppositional” other. This convoluted dynamic is equally prominent in the film’s narration, particularly that of Part I: The Shaving of the Head. “Britney [the daughter] bares her teeth and grips the razor” with unquestionable confidence but she is unable to refrain from divulging her own apprehension, and suffering: “The hair sticks to my hands. / It is sharp, and it hurts me.” Furthermore, the mother’s dream narrated in Part II: The Dream renders the mother at once powerful and powerless, with and without control: the described moment of conception requires an intentionality, a decision on behalf of the mother, but it is also completely unpredictable—dream-like, earthquake-like.

The two photographic works arguably see the mother at her most vulnerable, the words “I HATE MUM” inscribed across her shaven head. Although this inscription might seem void of tenderness and regressive when considering the daughter’s new maturity, the mother’s willingness to not only participate in but be the subject of this head shaving demonstrates trust. This compelling act necessitates the mother’s acknowledgement of her daughter’s agency, this acknowledgement in turn liberating the daughter of burdensome expectation and the mother, burdensome authority. The mother-daughter relationship is therefore strengthened as it is challenged, empowered as it is vulnerable, open to change as it is committed to sameness. The embrace of inherent friction says the unsayable.

Here!