Moir’s Pencil, A Posthumous Collaboration
Detail view - Moir Clements (1924-2015), posthumous collaboration with Mel Day, 2017, 5′ 7″ (unframed), digital pigment print, graphite, gaffer tape, Photo credit: Lee Friedman
Moir Clements (1924-2015), posthumous collaboration with Mel Day, 2017, 5′ 7″ (unframed), digital pigment print, graphite, gaffer tape
Exhibition image for Love & Longing, a show I curated at Root Division in San Francisco, CA.
Moir Clements (1924-2015), posthumous collaboration with Mel Day, 2017, 5′ 7″ (unframed), digital pigment print, graphite, gaffer tape (photo credit: Lee Friedman
Moir Clements (1924-2015) was a British artist, a Warden in London during World War II, and my grandmother. She painted scenes from all parts of the British Isles, always in oil paint, and often from the front of her motor caravan. Early in her career she became discouraged after her work was repeatedly rejected from exhibitions. She never felt justified calling herself an artist, and, indeed, developed an acerbic disdain for the contemporary British art establishment.
Alongside personal and artistic insecurities and longings (she lost both parents at a young age), her greatest loss was her failing sight. Moir, as she liked to be called, collaborated with her grandson, my cousin Laurence Upton, to create a series of paintings. He painted them, according to her verbal instructions and visual memory—using yellow heavily as the color she could see most clearly. At Root Division, lying by one of these collaborative paintings is a photograph of Moir’s worn-down fuchsia Staedtler pencil. She was the last person to use this pencil until I used it to sign her name posthumously. She was always an artist and is deeply loved.
LOVE AND LONGING CURATORIAL ESSAY
“Now that my ladder’s gone / I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”
—W. B. Yeats
Nov. 4 – Dec. 2 | Root Division, San Francisco
Opening Reception: Nov. 11, 2017, 7-10pm
Gallery Hours (or by appointment): Wednesday-Saturday, 2-6pm
Love & Longing shares descents into the unknown, artistic responses that perpetuate their own kind of fulfillment—“when the dark becomes another kind of lover” (John Tarrant). Through trying circumstances, a multiplicity of entanglements, and cascading heartbreaks, the works in Love & Longing share a sensibility fraught with loss, and reactions layered over time.
The exhibition includes works that chip—or pound—away at the wall separating art and life—that challenge, complicate, intensify, confront, and grapple with engagement and connection. Drawing upon a wide range of media and conceptual strategies—from the unflinchingly serious to the deadpan, from one-on-one to participatory encounters—the art works selected visually and aurally engage with unlikely, ungraspable hope, and a call for radical empathy and deepening relationships, in our own dark time.
