Essay by Toni Vallance for Contextualising Practice
The requirement to write about my work fills me with a small amount of dread, as I suspect it does for many artists. It is not that I do not like writing – I do. Nor do I believe my work is meaningless. The challenge lies in the abstract nature of my work, which resists literal interpretation or explanation. My work is not born from a specific image or idea; it stems from experience – lived, bodily, sensory – and is often subconscious. Part of the apprehension is attaching words, concepts, and theoretical frameworks to the work, which risks defining it and fixing its meaning. How do I, then, distil something as complex as the subconscious or the body into words? How can I represent something that emerges through process, intuition, and material entanglement, and not confine it? In this essay, I examine the process of making Untitled 04/25 (Figures 1 and 2) not to decode or rationalise what the painting represents, but rather to explore the forces that shape and move through the painting. By considering this painting through the lenses of the subconscious, sensation, the agency of matter and female corporeality, I seek to understand what is at stake when colour, gesture, and texture become a site of experience and material force.
Created in 2025, Untitled 04/25 (142 x 113 cm) is an abstract painting on canvas tacked with embroidery thread onto white tulle that has been stretched over a larger white frame (see also Figure 3). The canvas hangs loosely on the tulle with a rippled surface, and the raw, uneven edges of the canvas are visible, as is the frame under the sheer fabric. The central painting is characterised by multiple layers of wax pastel and charcoal drawing, acrylic paint, and oil pigment stick (oil paint in stick form). The painting is on the reverse of gessoed canvas, and the painted surface was prepared with transparent gesso to retain the raw colour of the cotton. Preparing the canvas this way also gives a particular ‘tooth’ to the surface; that is, it is not perfectly smooth. The initial drawing on the canvas was automatic, without a predetermined image or conscious outcome. I would describe this as feeling my way around the canvas and responding to the marks as they appear. Likewise, the subsequent layers of acrylic and oil paint were applied intuitively, guided by the previous gesture and colour. The only deliberate intervention was technical: I knew I had to put acrylic paint underneath the oil paint because it dries faster. The rest was emergent – colours responding to colours by erasing what lies beneath or finding harmony next to another, gestures answering gestures – a process of accumulation and , and reconstruction.
The method of creating this painting aligns with historical connections between abstraction and the subconscious, as formulated in the mid-20th century. Following the psychoanalytic theories posited by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Surrealist artists looked to dreams and repression, while Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning sought to channel unconscious impulses through bodily gesture (Poser 2008). Female artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell were also central in shaping the visual language of Abstract Expressionism, although they were often marginalised in the canon (Gabriel 2018). What resonates with me in this historical context is the idea of the unconscious as rooted in bodily gesture – a felt, somatic intelligence rather than a conceptual one.
Patricia Townsend’s Creative States of Mind: Psychoanalysis and the Artist’s Process (2019) endeavours to explain making through the bodily unconscious. Examining the experiences of multiple practising artists, Townsend suggests that the desire to start a new work begins with a kind of ‘pre-sense’ (2019:7) – an inkling or compulsion triggered by an object or sensation in the external world. Drawing on primary creativity theories arising from the mother-infant relationship, as Donald Winnicott and Christopher Bollas observed, Townsend foregrounds an entanglement of inner and outer worlds to explain this initial hunch. Winnicott suggests that the infant simultaneously experiences their inner and outer reality through a self-soothing ‘transitional object’ (2019:10), such as a teddy bear, when separated from their mother. Bollas emphasises the mother and uses the term ‘aesthetic moment’ (2019:12) to describe the infant’s transformation by the mother’s actions. Bollas asserts this is the first ‘human aesthetic’ (2019:13), and later aesthetic experiences draw on these interactions. Additionally, we continue to search for transformational objects to advance our development throughout life.
This framework becomes more complex when Townsend later discusses the creative process as an act of self-realisation whereby the artist ‘moulds or coerces the medium into becoming a form for her experience’ (2019:65). When I consider these observations in relation to making Untitled 04/25, that compulsion to start came through the materials: the wax pastel and the bodily sensation I got when I imagined dragging it across the ‘toothed’ surface of the canvas. However, whether this relates to some deep-rooted unconscious infantile phenomena I have concerning my mother feels like a (problematic) stretch. The transitional object is positioned as a defence mechanism for the infant and something we search for throughout our lives. This idealises the mother and situates her as both the origin and problem (see Rose 2018; Phillips 2022); indeed, that there is a problem. Moreover, it cannot be overlooked, as the feminist theorist and philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (1994) has clearly articulated, that psychoanalytic analyses such as these are rooted in patriarchal culture, which feels at odds with, and does not reflect, what the making experience was like for me. There is, however, a sense of my experience emerging in the work through my body, which I suppose is an act of self-realisation. But I would not describe my experience working with the materials as coercive. An explanation for the entanglement of inner and outer worlds that encapsulates a felt, reciprocal experience seems to be missing for me.
Artist and psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s description of her experience when creating is more aligned with what I am trying to articulate. Milner describes a loss of perceived boundaries and a fusion with the artwork (Townsend 2015, 2019). Similarly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty provides a phenomenological perspective (how we consciously experience things through bodily sensation) with his concept of ‘the Flesh’ – the fluid entanglement between body and world where boundaries blur (analysed in Abram 1997:66). Indeed, making Untitled 04/25 became a mode of attunement, where the distinctions between my body and the materials dissolved. It was a deeply felt process – the sensation of the wax pastel dragging over the rough surface of the canvas, the initial layers of acrid green and mars violet acrylic paint evoking visceral responses, and the counter layers of richly coloured and textured oil stick applied by hand without the intervention of a paintbrush. Further, while making this painting, I realised for the first time how much I blur my vision when applying paint, so that the image on the canvas becomes fuzzy. unconscious act of blurring boundaries? This all suggests that both subconscious and conscious sensations are at play – a subconscious attraction to a particular colour in a specific form (such as pastel, charcoal, acrylic paint, or oil stick), accompanied by a blurring of my vision during application, along with a conscious bodily response to the material. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi, Simon O’Sullivan (2001) proposes that art operates via ‘affect’ – bodily, unconscious intensities that register as sensation rather than emotion (Massumi 2021). O’Sullivan posits that affective encounters reorder the self and how we relate to the world, not in a transcendent sense but as an inherent quality within the world. With this additional explanation, I would proffer that the creation of Untitled 04/25 was a sensorial encounter with colour, gesture, and texture that negotiated an ongoing entanglement between my body and the outside world, both unconscious and conscious.
Yet, I cannot help but feel there is more to it than an intertwining of subconscious and conscious bodily experience. There is a particular matter-with-force aspect. Abstract artist Amy Sillman articulates this dynamic:
‘As a painter who uses colour as a material, I could describe colour as simply the flesh of these changes – the way I mark the negotiations and negotiations of painting-time. I just keep going until I find a weight and a surprise that tells me something I don’t already know; it’s more a process of détournement than of progress. Colours block each other out, contradict each other; they live and die in an ongoing process of destruction and reconstruction.’ (2022:76)
Sillman’s reflection mirrors my experience of making Untitled 04/25: painting as a negotiation between the forces of the materials and my body. There is a kind of vibration in the materials that I am responding to or working with. This observation reflects the ideas of new materialism, which sees matter as vital and agential rather than gendered and passive (van der Tuin 2011; Gamble, Hanan & Nail 2019). Jane Bennett (2010) posits that matter is not passive or inert, but lively, agentic, capable of affecting and resisting purely human control. The world is not merely an assemblage of discrete and inert things; it is a swarm of vitalities. Similarly, Tim Ingold (2013) concludes that materials do not wait for an external force to make them into something meaningful; instead, they are meaningful in their own right with histories, trajectories, and resistances – that they co-compose meaning. Barbara Bolt (2007) and Karen Barad (2007) push this further. For Bolt, art is a material performance where the artist is not the controller but a co-agent. While for Barad, matter is an active participant in the entanglement of reality-making, what they term ‘agential realism’ (2007:26) – where distinct agencies do not exist in advance but come into being together: ‘distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action’ (2007:33). This reframing suggests that the materials (including surface and colour as pigmented matter) used to create Untitled 04/25 were active and relational, with their own weights, urgencies, and logics. The painting has emerged as an unfolding conversation between colour, gesture, texture, and sensation – a site of entanglement where the boundaries between body and the world were porous.
At this point, I recognise there is more to explore regarding the concept of porosity and how the work is presented – unstretched, with the textured, raw edges of the canvas remaining visible, and space between the canvas and the edge of the frame. The sheer tulle on which the painting rests acknowledges and extends the raw edges of the canvas, resisting the modernist ideal of the autonomous, self-contained art object (see Osborne 1989). Furthermore, the frame is suspended from the wall between galvanised metal braces – a common feature in building construction, not fine art. The edge of the canvas and the extension of the frame, and the space between the wall and the frame, become charged sites of negotiation, existing neither entirely within nor outside the work, a threshold which Jacques Derrida terms the ‘parergon’ (Duro 2019). When I chose to present the work this way, I aimed to address an ongoing issue with my paintings regarding the treatment of edges. In doing so, I have created a further visual reference for my felt experience without consciously realising it. One that pushes against decoration, restraint, and containment.
What has emerged, then, from this entanglement? Colour, gesture, and texture do – but not in a decorative or essentialist sense (the view that women have a fixed, universal essence). The painting has emerged from my experience, through my body, which is female, yes. However, as Laura Elkin suggests in Art Monsters (2024), instead of viewing this as an inherently ‘female or feminine aesthetic we might entertain the idea of a feminist phenomenology … something that attempts to express what it means to live in a female body’ (2024:53). What has emerged on the canvas and at the edges is resistant, insistent, unstable, and irreducible. Elizabeth Grosz (1994) writes of female corporeality (the specific experiences of the female body) as volatile, generative, and continually becoming, rejecting the essentialist idea of the body as a fixed, biological object. In this light, for me, the colours, gestures, and textures – the surface, the texture of the pastel and paint, the raw, uneven edges of the canvas, the sheer tulle, and the space between the frame and the wall – that emerge in Untitled 04/25 embody that volatility. Returning to Sillman: ‘… the flesh of these changes.’ Colour, gesture, and texture hold their own weight, intensity, and charge. They vibrate, bleed, stain, fray, spill, and resist containment in a patriarchal existence, making visible the invisible frequencies of the female experience.
In examining the process of making Untitled 04/25, I have traced a path through subconscious impulse, affective and phenomenological intensity, and the agency of materials, arriving at a place of emergence rather than resolution – a site of intra-action where colour, gesture, texture, and body co-compose meaning in ways that are felt before they are thought. Crucially, the process reveals that colour, gesture, and texture are not neutral or decorative but charged with the volatility and intensity of female corporeality. In the rawness of the materials and gestures, and their refusal to be contained by stretcher bars, language, and patriarchal logic, they have become a form of embodied thinking. They bleed, fray, agitate, and resist. I remain apprehensive about writing about my work, fearing it may be confined within specific theoretical frameworks, and insist that it be viewed as shaped alongside those ideas. Colour, gesture, and texture co-compose meaning with my body. That emergence may be partial, fragmented, and open-ended, but nonetheless, it is real and felt.
References
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