"I once read a passage from an essay by Chris Stephens in a Tate publication that I had purchased second hand, about one of my favourite British Modernist painters, Ben Nicholson.

I have highlighted the passage with a fluoro marker and have read it time and time again. I don’t think anything I have ever read about another person’s art practice has spoken to me as profoundly as this, addressing the insecurities I felt as a stay-at-home mother, wrongly undervaluing that role. It speaks of the quality I am trying to achieve in my own work, deliberately exposing the hand of the maker, the layers of thought, errors, corrections, my process made transparent to the viewer. Most of all, it speaks of the importance of my domestic space, my enduring muse, occasionally stepping out into the landscape but always coming home."

Nicholson compared his manner of working with the memory of his mother scrubbing the kitchen table. The comparison is typical of an artist who could both prioritize his art over everything else and undermine any sense of pomposity or grandeur. He set out to show that the making of art was ordinary and domestic, as essential as housework.

Beyond the personal and anecdotal, Ben Nicholson’s desire to associate his working practices with his mother’s domestic chores has a more profound significance. I have argued elsewhere that his continual emphasis on the handmade quality of the surfaces of his works associates them both with vernacular, craft traditions and with the domestic realm. In defiance of what is often seen as the dominant masculine aggressiveness of Modernism, Nicolson set out to establish a feminised modern art that focused on the domestic, the private and the intimate.  -Extract from an essay by Chris Stephens, Tate Britain


Studio portrait image credit: Jessica Tremp