Rose Nag: Betwixt and between – work in progress.
16 April – 9 May 2010
Work on paper and canvas, 2000–2010
Rose has been teaching at London Met’ and its predecessors, the Polytechnic and then the University of North London, since 1989. Her demand that drawing is an explorative act, both visceral and poetic as well as rigorous and exacting, has introduced generations of students to a perception of space beyond measurement and a school of thinking through drawing.
This has been most explicit in working with foundation and first year students. But Rose has worked with design studios and units, on field-trips and workshops throughout the department, reminding students of the value of standing back and looking again, differently.
Colourspace, one of Rose’s most consistently inspiring teaching programmes, prompted a different output through a combination of colour theory, studies of paintings, buildings and places, articulating students’ spatial imagination and sensitivity to colour and material.
Rose’s visual thinking, her seeing through drawing and painting, is now showing here everywhere in the department, and on show in this exhibition. We see how she sees and can make tenuous, teasing connections to the work that she has done with students over those years. Perhaps too, it marks a transition from teacher back to artist and to many more places and spaces to be revealed.
Andrew Stone
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‘The work in this exhibition represents a sampling of ideas from the last ten years. Transitory moments observed in the spaces of landscape and buildings are recorded in drawings, photographs, sketches and ‘the mind’s eye’.
I am interested in capturing a moment in time and making a piece of work which becomes that experience: the gaze, the perception or glimpse of a fleeting or quiet visual event, and specifically how the non-physical substance of light is constantly changing the identity of things, often bringing inner qualities to the surface.
The images undergo a long process of abstraction in order to eliminate pictorial and literal references. The work strives for autonomy, inviting the eye and finger to contemplate and trace its marks and lines.
During the last couple of years a fascination with printmaking processes has encouraged and furthered the intentions of the work.
Special thanks to Annie McDonald, Frank Connolly and Gwenda Jones whose insights and encouragement enabled the work to be; and to the skills of Rex Henry and Davood Kiani whose skills and expertise enabled the work to be presented. Thanks to my partner Edward Woodman, the photographer who always encourages one to ‘look again’ and also a small dedication to the memory of Katherine Vaughan-Williams, né Shonfield, 22 August 1954 – 2 September 2003′
Rose Nag
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We have been living with one of Rose Nag’s paintings for some time now. It shows a momentary effect of light broken or filtered by a curtain which catches shadows in its folds and lets more light through in looser passages. At times it seems the simplest, thinnest fabric, at others rich and golden. But is it a substance at all or the sunlight we are responding to? I have never been sure, and talking to Rose has made me more uncertain still. I think she once told me the light had passed through a venetian blind to end up on the surface of a wooden table. So my filmy bits would become stretches of intense glare, and my golden glow would be places where the grain of the wood became visible. Instead of looking toward an opening in a wall, we are looking down on a flat plane that we see in plan. In the end I want to have it both ways, for the work is elusive; it shimmers and glares and folds and lies flat at the same time.
Rose is often saving out some element of a situation, in this case what light does to substances, and giving it a mercurial quality that frees it to be something more than its everyday self. I hope you won’t find it fanciful to link this insubstantiality with the history of the School in which we have taught.
Rose and Colin and I have shared at least five different offices in the twenty years we’ve taught together. It doesn’t sound like a lifetime, but it feels like more than one. None of the spaces in the old building are there any more. I’ve been back once or twice but could not tell where I was. Only the corridors are in the old places, which prevents memory from taking up its old positions.
Our move from the old building was in its way tormented. While we waited for the new building, we taught in the dark unheated upper floors of the taxi building next door, now bulldozed in its turn. Such changes are not as strange as all that. Really, it’s in the nature of a school that it disappears before your eyes. Withdrawing the physical premises just echoes the perpetual replacement of one group of students with another.
I connect Rose with many of the students of the past, because she connected so strongly with them. Over the years we talked a lot about teaching and I thought I knew what Rose was like as a teacher, but I still had something to learn, and was surprised by a talk she gave earlier this year to a group setting off for Rome. She illustrated it with startling travel sketches by Aalto, Kahn and others. Best of all, she fit the different kinds of sketch into one’s way of inhabiting the city, so you saw how you might end up doing all the kinds yourself, in the course of your normal days. It was her old knack for reminding the students of the rest of life that lies outside the present moment.
I remember Rose vividly on student trips to Venice and Florence, sketching in the sleepy warmth of squares, joining in convivial evenings that got more convivial when she guided us to a student haunt after which we were bound to get pleasantly lost going home.
We have waited years for her exhibition. My appetite has been whetted by slides of work in watery mediums that could be the sea or a billowing moor seen from above, or ridged cloth like a landscape. There is something veil-like about lots of these subjects, a subtle and delicate surface teasing us with the idea of a solid form beneath. There’s a particularly fine etching on the smallest scale full of sharpest, closest observation. It’s a tree, or so I think, and for me it exemplifies Rose’s ability to widen our horizons by attending to what lies unregarded near at hand.
Robert Harbison
