BE ALIVE WITH ME

Return Like the Sun: Unique Photographs by Paula Rae Gibson Creativity, in any artform as in life, is a profoundly transformative act. The artist is the messenger of creativity, forging intangible impulses and ideas – abstracted thoughts and untamed feelings – into objects, words, sounds, movements or images. Some artists’ works demonstrate primarily a technical skill, illustrate a conceptual theory, propound a political philosophy, function as a commercial product, or combine these and other positions. Perhaps most frequently though, an artwork emerges from deeper within, from a desire to express personal identity and confirm selfhood. It is a heartfelt compulsion for visibility and connection. At its most fundamental, it is a statement of raw existence. An assertion, against oblivion, of the amazing fact of our human presence, with all of its power, complexity and fragility. While Paula Rae Gibson’s creative flair seem to have been always present, the facts of her biography play an important part in her distinctive formulation as an artist. Born in London in 1968, she grew up outside of the city in the countryside. Sometime during the late 1980s, she began experimenting with a 35mm camera, teaching herself the basics of black and white photography and becoming intoxicated by the alchemy of the darkroom. As a young woman with a spirit of discovery, she travelled extensively, visiting Japan and South America. In Ecuador, at the age of 21, a serious car accident resulted in surgery and the loss of her spleen. This early catastrophe seems to have made her acutely conscious of the shocking proximity of death alongside the fragile beauty of life. Tragically, this realization was soon to be tested further. After a period of recovery from the car accident, at the age of 27, she met the eminent film and television director Brian Gibson. Their connection was full of intense synergy and shared creativity. They married and conceived a daughter. But soon after she was born, when the child was just 20 weeks old, Brian was diagnosed with bone cancer. There followed his agonizing demise, 850 days Paula counted, and he died in 2004. Immediately, she was thrust simultaneously into dual roles of widowhood and single parenthood. It took all her reserves and coping mechanisms to field the ensuing and inevitable pain, confusion, upheaval and responsibility. For her, during this turbulent time, contact with others was freighted with difficulties and a strange feeling of embarrassment. Instead, she often turned to photography as her mirror and confidant. During this time, Gibson entered into what might be described as ‘full catastrophe living’. This is the title of a book, written in 1990, by Jon Kabat-Zinn. The book’s subtitle is, Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. For Gibson, photography became her wisdom in the midst of trauma. It was not simply a coping mechanism, but an immersive, cathartic and therapeutic artistic practice. Here, she could explore and express not just the grief and fear, but also a range of other emotions that flooded her being. The resulting group of images, made over several subsequent years, render an elegiac spectrum of personal experience. Long before the digital selfie became embedded in contemporary culture, Gibson was obsessively constructing a similar kind of visual diary. Yet hers was not a light wearing of semi-fictionalized identities, learned postures and performative attitudes. Her images are redolent with yearning to document and perform her own grief, longing and uncertainties, casting herself as the main protagonist in an all-too-real, real-life drama. However, they are not portraits, as Gibson stresses, ‘they are not pictures of me, but pictures of how I was feeling.’ In the wake of physical loss, they picture a complex, partly eroticized need for touch, an assertion of bodily and cognitive visibility, of presence. They are literally and figuratively acts of exposure and illumination, an antidote to the feeling of disappearance and loss of identity, a process of recovery and protection. Threaded through the series, other characters aside from herself appear: her husband’s face haunts her work; and her daughter transforms from a cradled infant into a visceral young girl. Here, photography performs its most well-known but always astonishing magic: collapsing time, shadows and fragments with melancholy beauty. As emotive as they are, it is not simply the autobiographical aspects of Gibsons’s photographs that makes them arresting and unique. Each of her images carries a distinctive pictorial hallmark, a handmade presence that aligns her choice of process and technique with a nuanced expression of emotions. Her visual signature is created specifically by the use of analogue darkroom printing and later manipulations of the paper print. These include toning, staining, bleaching, ripping, burning, the evidential rings of coffee cups and handwriting on the surface. There are some images that use painted splatters or washes of photographic chemistry. These result in selective parts of the image being revealed or developed. Others collage one print on top of another, concealing fragments of an image beneath. Gibson also found that prints from the same negative could look and feel vastly different when cropped or manipulated in varied ways. As the photographer and master printer Ansel Adams famously noted, ‘the negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score, and the print the performance’. Gibson typically used black and white paper, torn from a long roll, to create uneven shapes in contrast with the pristine rectangular and square formats of conventional photographic prints. The interventions that each of Gibson’s photographs has undergone imbues them with an improvisational quality. Her prints have tangible patina to their surface. They are like the wounds of time and experience that can be read on the human body. The effect is unbounded and contingent. She wanted, she says, ‘to make pictures that are not visible in the viewfinder’. Hers are not the composed, standardized, precision results of an optical and chemical technology. They are more like a breathing product of human nature. It is an unconventional, experimental approach fit for attempting to harness immeasurable feelings. While Gibson’s practice is largely self-taught, there are some visual touchstones that resonate with her work and help position it within the history of photography. Foremost among these is the great Victorian pioneer, Julia Margaret Cameron, in particular, her intimate portrayal of her friends and family captured in close-up and deliberate soft focus. Cameron’s photographs are replete with swirls and smudges, characteristic of her hand-produced collodion-on-glass negatives, printed on albumen papers in tones of purplish umber. Gibson’s imagery harks back to Cameron’s era, long before the age of mass-produced and digital photography. It also links with the works of the ‘pictorialist’ movement. Pictorialist images were crafted by select groups of photographers – among them Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz and Annie Brigman – who counteracted photography’s commercial industrialization at the turn of the 19th century. Like Cameron, they used blur and visual symbolism as a signal of poetic intent. Approaches that also resonate with Gibson’s can be traced later into the 20th century: for example, in Francesca Woodman’s exploration of her own figure in an interior world of seemingly timeless condensed experience; in Czech ‘outsider artist’ Miroslav Tichý’s voyeuristic yet lyrical fascination for the female body, coupled with his rough-hewn printing; or in Sally Mann’s disquieting images dealing with the beauty of familial relationships, and cultural taboos of childhood, sexuality, and death. Like Gibson, each of these photographers convey an emotional inner life and a mysterious intensity through a deliberate harnessing of experimental craft and technique. Many of Gibson’s prints have an added poetry in the form of her handwritten fragments and phrases, like her thoughts circling on their surface. The words flow freely, often following the shapes of the images or the edges of the torn paper, defying fixed orientation. Her written aphorisms do not turn the photographs into illustrations; rather they meld with them to enhance the mood of an intimate internal existence. When asked about her use of text over imagery, she says, ‘writing puts oxygen on it’. The text on one print emotes: Will I ever feel that again? Another asserts: To love is to believe. One neatly encapsulates the passages of light and darkness allied with constantly shifting sentiments: the faith and the fears return like the sun. In the years since their making, these early photographs of Gibson’s have become an historical record of a period of turmoil and the therapeutic processes of creativity in her life. She now recognizes the life it explores as ‘a me that lives in memory’. In more recent years, she has worked in a similar vein, but collaborating instead with dancers, performers and other individuals. In them, she continues to question the nature of relationships, and the fertile bonds between interior impulses and outward gestures. In retrospect, the weight of her substantial body of work is less of a memento mori than a headlong dive into the cyclical energies of life and death. Channelling one’s innermost struggles, desires, uncertainties and revelations into an artwork often feels like a psychological and bodily necessity for the artist. The act of creativity is a dreamlike release and a catalyst. And the artwork is a trace of the artist’s core existence. When artists reveal the kernel of a specific personal experience we feel its accuracy. And when they do this, we trust and believe them. For what they relate to us feels right and true, even if it is something that is not part of our own personal experience. If we are receptive, their works open a pathway to a wider sense of human connection and empathy. On this process of outpouring – of the delicate act of converting private life into a readable artwork – the poet W.B. Yeats cautioned: ‘I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams’. Not all of the productions of the artist are of course equal or need to be shared to be a valid part of their imaginative process. The skill of more accomplished artists lies in their ability to consider their audience – to know that, once released, their work becomes a cultural offering that extends beyond themselves. Paula Rae Gibson is just such an artist. To reflect on, reassess, refine, edit and present the results to others, takes further intellectual energy, stamina, belief, collaboration and bravery. Throughout her vividly creative life, Gibson has openly transformed the strength of her experience into her art. And in so doing, she has fashioned unique expressions of herself, and those she cares for, that nevertheless stir others with their authenticity and instinctual force. Martin Barnes Senior Curator, Photography Victoria and Albert Museum to be exhibited at the Fitzrovia Chapel, October 1-7 2024