THINKING THROUGH PAINTING
What does painting do? It seems to me that there is more to painting than the desire to produce 'painterly' objects. When I think about painting I start to wonder about what it does and how it thinks. These recent works by Maeve Woods are ostensibly and superficially 'abstract', integral in form and content, vivacious paintings that move. Or rather the paint moves, or rather the painter has moved to produce this image of movement, which is to say an image that is more than purely indexical. Visual movement suggests physical movement through time, or what we might call process.
Maeve's painting then is perhaps part performance or improvisation, trying ideas out in an inquisitive empirical practice. In these recent works she asks what happens if we scumble lines with brush or fork with Castanettes, or cluster scallops that surprisingly shift their colour scheme in a rectangular block in the centre in Stand Still - Watch it Flow, or in Side Climbing arrange various four-sided shapes so that they all seem to be heading off in the same direction. Titles may or may not provide clues, often they are allusions to films such as Buñuel's 'Belle de Jour' in which Belle Liked What She Saw in that Little Box, or while moulding perspectival space into a box containing coloured sticks, Orpheus Portal with Yellow Step doubles as the mirrored entrance to Cocteau's vision of the underworld. Some titles might also be red herrings throwing us off the scent, but they invariably provide a complementary semiotic context to the geometric abstraction.
The indexical here embodies the complexity of muscle memory, style is a language learned through familiarity and mimesis. Producing these paintings, it seems to me, is not the same as producing visual material that represents or expresses, it is human in its physical scale; its traces record not just movement but decisions, ideas, imaginings, where movement becomes thought embodied in material, thinking through painting.
Steven Ball, London, April 2009