With contributions from: Susie Hamilton, Edward Liddle, Kavel Rafferty, Lucy Cade, Alex Michon, Lucy Bolton, Rosemary Cronin, Jennifer Caroline Campbell, Gemma Browne, Kirsty Buchanan, Alli Sharma, Camilla Gray, Lucia Jones, Cathy Lomax.

A Window on the World

In November 2024 I attended 'What Light Through Yonder Window Breaks', a conference organised by the Paul Mellon Centre at the Warburg Institute in London. In her introduction Rebecca Troop noted that we are now five years on from the Covid pandemic, a time when windows heightened boundaries between out and in. The huge quantity of recent window themed artworks (and the many works submitted for consideration for this issue) are a legacy of this period. Whether looking out, or stealing glimpses in, windows allow us to see, if only momentarily, what other lives look like.

This issue considers many different types of windows and window associated items and narratives, often foregrounding literary references. Susie Hamilton presents a series of paintings made after reading Grimm's Fairy Tales. Her cosy cottages with their invitingly glowing windows, do not however always bring the comfort that their appearance suggests. Meanwhile Jennifer Caroline Campbell's short story on page 12 is claustrophobic and tense with a window dividing us from shadowy doppalgangers.

Any consideration of windows must at some point deal with curtains, which when gauzy and thin tantalisingly veil the view beyond the glass. Edward Liddle's net curtain project and our cover painting by Camilla Gray, both focus on this dappled view, albeit from opposite sides of the divide. Glass can also be used to distort a view and the textured glass often found in bathrooms or front doors is utilised by Kavel Rafferty in her Shadow Flower works to 'press' paintings of flowers. Gemma Browne's painted curtain, pictured on page 34 is designed to frame and obscure rather than dapple – made of red velvet it is opulent, heavy and assured.

Alongside architectural manifestations Arty also covers less literal windows. Both Lucy Cade and Rosemary Cronin consider the eye as a window – Cade in her oval paintings fringed with eyelashes, Cronin in a series of candy-tinted photographs taken at the Centre for Psychic Studies in London.

At the Paul Mellon Centre conference shop windows and the art of display, were the subject of a number of papers. Social anthropologist Birgitta Huse described these windows, that we look at rather than look through, as provocateurs between art, commerce and cultural traditions. This seductive space is also occupied by magazines which act as windows to a fantasy world. On page 12 I write about a cinematic adaptation of Flaubert's literary classic Madame Bovary, a story about a young woman for whom windows (including magazines) represent a barrier between her romantic fantasies and actual life. As the film plays out windows are shattered, actually and metaphorically, providing important punctuation points.

French film critic André Bazin described the cinema screen as a window on the world. Hitchcock makes this into a mise-en-abyme trick in what is arguably cinema's most famous window film, Rear Window (1954), implicating us in an act of voyeurism as we watch temporarily disabled photographer Jeff (James Stewart) as he surveils a wall of windows populated by a multiplicity of different characters in an adjacent apartment block. Windows, and most particularly the figure at the window, also lend them to ghost stories. The lushly contrasting black and white of The Innocents (1961) creates an appropriatly atmospheric mise-en-scene for its shadowy figure at the window. Lucy Bolton's writing about the film on page 23 is accompanied by Alex Michon's fluid, mostly monochrome images.

All these wonderfully diverse and creative contributions offer our own Arty window on creative practice.

Cathy Lomax
January 2025  
   

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Arty 48

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