West, London
Vivian Lynn
Mind Fields
Southard ReidSouthard Reid is proud to present Mind Fields, marking the first exhibition in the United Kingdom of the work of Vivian Lynn (b. Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, 1931, d. Wellington, 2018). "Our bodies are mediated by cultural codes, as are our daily lives. My interest is in dislocating and transgressing these codes in a way that makes them tangible. The different bodies, the biological, imaginary, socio-economic, political and mythic, that form a corporeal ground of intelligence and desire, are alluded to in my work" From both within and outside of the conventional structures of the art establishment, Lynn sought to construct and record an alternative tradition for art, one that had deep roots but which she re-worked so that its symbols were no longer inimical to women. She interwove a diverse range of media: sculpture, installation, collage, painting, photography, drawing, print and book-making, incorporating references to history, culture, politics, society, technology and chemical, biological and medical processes. Mind Fields includes series' from 1984 and 2007, in which Lynn examined the workings of the mind and the body, as she herself experienced its failings, and their relation to external reality and deep history. Utilising a formal fluidity between drawing, painting and layered materials, the works reveal her recognition of the co-existence of, and interdependency between, interior and exterior worlds. Her surfaces register the interplay of the human, animal, and vegetal. Lynn’s Mind Field series of work, completed in 2007, combine a complex array of materials - painted Rorschach cut-outs float over shaped and rectilinear planes of aluminium sealed with wrinkled, translucent paper that has been treated to resemble a metallic yet bloodied skin. At once female genitalia and muscled torsos, butterflies and brains, her floating signs mirror her efforts to dismantle the hierarchies of what she called the ‘either/or’. The large-scale 1984 drawings Wounded Garden and Asherim IV present powerful feminine preserves that are at once intimate and vertiginous, binding together nature and culture, interior and exterior. Mind Fields brings together works conceived either in relation to the vestigial traces of a modernist grid or as natural forms transitioning into human constructions. They evidence two nodes in a sixty-year practice that saw the artist recode her inherited intellectual frameworks and modernist training to posit a critical vocabulary layering and merging abstraction and figuration, landscape and the body, materials and imagery.