The Little Hollow of Light and Shade

Not far from where we live in London there is a domestic house that hosts art exhibitions, the postROOM gallery. Their most recent show featured these wall texts by Thomas A. Clark, whose work I've discussed frequently on this blog. He has exhibited similar texts at the Cairn Gallery, as you can see in the YouTube clip I've embedded below. In this video he explains the significance of colour, font and location, e.g. blue text (blue is "always a matter of shades and tone of subtlety and instability") is placed under a window "looking onto the sky, which even in Scottish weather can often give a full range of blues." Here in London, entering the immaculate white kitchen-dining room of this Islington house from its small garden, you see a text above the space which seemed very apt when it was buzzing with conversation at the exhibition's opening evening: 'the grove of delight'. Condensed landscape poems like this bring nature into the home. They make you think about the poetics of space - how a room and a grove might have similar meanings for us. They also wittily interact with furniture and fittings: the lamp shade above could itself be 'a hollow of light and shade', and 'the place of stone' below is just above the stone floor, next to a rock-coloured armchair.

 

In one of my first posts on this blog back in 2005 I mentioned the Chinese tradition of inscribing poetic text at sites of natural beauty. I quoted one written by Yüan Chieh (719-772) which drew attention to a scenic terrace and cliff, recommending the place to those weary of the city. Wall texts within a home travel in the opposite direction: from a specific house to an unspecified grove or place of stone, rather than from a particular landscape to urban life in general. Like the poetry books Tom publishes, they leave space for the reader's imagination and recollections. In a world of short attention spans, their brevity is an invitation to pause and reflect, rather than flick forward to the next thing. The texts at postROOM are temporary, but visiting this exhibition you can't help wondering what it would be like to live permanently with these beautiful, simple inscriptions and whether they might, in a modest way, influence the thoughts and conversations of those who encounter them.