Travels in the Exotic Kitchen
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling
Fiona Denning is a painter and a gardener. So, you might expect her subject matter to be full of pretty petals, leafy shapes and sad poppies. But not at all. In fact, Fiona states, almost proudly, that “I’ve never painted a flower in all my life.” Fiona is not interested in pretty. Her work suggests that she is after some other, far more elusive quarry.
THE DEBATABLE LANDS
She says that she has always felt impelled to paint, despite the fact that she trained in textiles. Maybe that is not quite as odd as it sounds. Her paintings have a great feel for design and pattern, perhaps slightly in the mode of Matisse. Interestingly, she comments that for a long period she worked in a scratchy abstract fashion, an approach that tends to emphasise shapes and colours, cut free from any of the irritations of depiction. But her recent work has pulled back a little towards the recognisable world. Her work now exists in the debatable lands between something suggestive of real stuff, and stripped-down design.
Wipe Me away Like a Lipstick Smudge
She explained that this shift in her approach was, in part, caused by a strange epiphany in lockdown. “During lockdown one night I stood in my kitchen and saw the reflection in my window of objects, ordinary domestic objects, floating as if the inside was out.”
Prompted by this experience she has created a series of works that pursue the curious poetry of the humdrum objects around us. In these works, bowls, jars, cups, bottles and vases are given an entirely new feel. The use of pink and streaky outlines breathes something almost sensual into the world of kitchenware. Quite an achievement.
LIKE A LIPSTICK SMUDGE
Her painting style has a deceptive simplicity to it. The lines and the brushwork go down swiftly and retain that spontaneous energy. Nothing is overworked or fussy. Sometimes it takes courage to just leave something.
Inevitably some of the paintings hit the spot more than others. The perfect splashy collision of pink and grey in her depiction of a vase and bowl is probably one of her definitive pieces. The title, ‘Wipe Me Away Like a Lipstick Smudge,’ adds an extra vibration to the whole piece. As if somehow the objects around us are also caught up in our love lives. Which they are, I suppose.
You can find this theme in other pieces, such as ‘Spilled Milk (and crying),’ and ‘Your Sugar Sits Untouched.’ We should add that the subversive local artist, Mark Walter, has had a significant input in helping Fiona arrive at titles. It is an interesting question as to how far a title changes how we see a painting, but that is another debate.
VOYEURS IN THE KITCHEN
It doesn’t seem quite right to suggest that Denning sees our kitchen objects as silent voyeurs. In fact, what strikes home the most, is the sense that she is more interested in objects as simple shapes to hang oil paint on. In that sense, she comes across as something of a purist: a painter obsessed with paint. She certainly handles it with the confidence of someone who knows how colours behave toward one another. And how line can either hold or drain its initial energy. This is hard won knowledge.
Her recent exhibition at the Hastings Art Forum was something of a triumph. Writers are often said to have ‘found their voice’ and something similar seems to have happened to Denning. She has found her world and, strangely, it turns out to be a kitchen. Not the room of stereotypical female servitude
but more the exotic space of loving cups and all their playmates. But maybe that sounds a bit too much like a weird wartime warning, like ‘cups have ears.’ Denning is not anthro-pomorphising her kitchen-ware, quite the reverse; she is looking for its shapely essence. And maybe that is what she has been chasing all along: the simple elegant purity of being a thing, a vessel. Existentialism in a teapot, so to speak. We loved it.
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