This section is an account of how plasticity manifested in my project through the operations of improvisation, addition and erasure. I harnessed the agency of paint as a driver of pictorial content. The fluid painterly matrices directed my responses and the ways in which subsequent forms emerged. Improvisation required of me a heightened state of responsiveness. Plasticity embraces contradictory positions simultaneously; it holds extremes together and they in turn act upon each other in nuanced tension. The interaction of opposing forces generates form and movement in the paintings. Their influence was kinetic, unstable and non- sequential. Improvisation in painting is a plastic operation.
In this chapter I describe a suite of works in the Spill Series titled The Rough Guide, in which limbs are twisted, dismembered and reassembled, and the soft tissue of the paintings perforates to register the violence of systemic pressure; however, they retain their irrepressible vitality.
Fig. 36. Megan Walch, The Spill Series (The Rough Guide 1), 2013-16. Oil and enamel on composite panel, 130 x 130 cm. Collection of the artist.
The Spill Series (The Rough Guide 1 and 2) (Figs. 36 and 38) exist in shallow pictorial space, like models assembled from a compendium of forms. The Spill Series (The Rough Guide 1) (Fig. 36) is a vertical character generated from the collision of shape, texture and colour. A calligraphic sweep creates a milky skeleton interwoven with branches. A polychrome Lichtenstein ‘brushstroke’ (Fig. 37) imitates spontaneous gesture, its mannered tongue unfurls as sea spray or white foam. This twisting cyclonic sinew might have been spun from the metallic field; forms appear to emerge from and subside back into this grey mixture. Sweeps of quinacrodone and vermillion deny easy aesthetic pleasure as we witness the torsion of mutation in progress.
Fig. 37. Roy Lichtenstein, Big Painting 6, 1965.
Oil and Magna on canvas, 235 x 330 cm. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
In The Spill Series (The Rough Guide 1 and 2) (Figs. 36 and 38), metallic grey fields are pockmarked with violently splattered solvent. These marks resemble algal bloom or condensation and they assert the presence of the picture plane.
Fig. 38. Megan Walch, The Spill Series(The Rough Guide 2), 2013-16. Oil and enamel on composite panel, 130 x 130 cm. Collection of the artist.
In The Spill Series (The Rough Guide 2.) (Fig. 38), forms are compromised as they twist and buckle. Structures coalesce and unravel to congeal again. An image of crushed duct-tape weeps and splatters. Turgid vermillion viscera become elastic. Gloss black and orange enamel sit with unabsorbed tension on the fragile surface of the picture plane. Pooled, viscous lime puckers with the texture of milk that has formed a skin on this chaotic, compressed hybrid. Figuration/abstraction, congelation of form/dispersal of form, matte/gloss, macro/micro, control/spontaneity, subject/object, fixed/fluidity – the interplay between opposing forces is the engine that drives transformation of form in the paintings. These mutually configuring intensities generate agitation when placed in relation to one another.
I returned repeatedly to rework these two images after long periods of time. They became a glossary of painterly terms for the project. The syntax of my operations began with a calligraphic sweep of liquefied enamel that registered my gesture and with which I then proceeded to interfere. I flirted with spontaneous splashes and liquid pools. Physical trace, viscera and vapour collided and feigned ejaculation, suggesting the violent tension and pressure required for the compression of these forms – extracted, synthesised then examined against a neutral backdrop from which they continue to emerge and subside. A shallow depth of field renders them as portraits of pet mutants in a diorama.
Drawing upon the thought of the dissident Surrealist Georges Bataille and his theory of the informe – which was translated by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss’s in their account of ‘the Formless’ as that which is resistant to form and is the alteration of form – erasure and undoing of form consequently includes the generation of “bad form.”142 The theory of contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou offers a philosophical conception of plasticity that resonates with Bataille’s notion of the informe. Etymologically, plasticity relates to ‘model’ and to ‘mould’, the capacity both to give and to receive shape and structure.143 Malabou's theory shows how form undoes, alters and reconfigures itself. According to Malabou, plasticity’s currency is contradiction. It is both the creation of shape and structure and its annihilation; plasticity holds extremes
142 Bois and Krauss, Formless, 108. 143 Malabou, "The Future of Hegel".
together to configure one another.144 Materialising mutability is a plastic operation. Malabou’s theory of plasticity extends to a theory of temporal plasticity that destroys accepted linear definitions of past and future.145
In a description of the theory of ‘affect’, Melissa Gregg uses similar terminology to Malabou. She writes: “Affect arises in the capacities to act and be acted upon.”146 ‘Affect’ is the circulation of visceral ‘intensities’ and ‘resonances’
that pass body-to-body – human and nonhuman – that register alongside conscious knowing.147 The paintings in this series continue to corrupt a sense of optimism, and exert increasing levels of strain on the organs of painterly forms until membranes are breached, herniate, rupture and splatter.
144 Ibid. 145 Ibid.
146 Ahmed, "Happy Objects", 1. 147 Ibid.
Fig. 39. Megan Walch, The Spill Series (The Rough Guide 3), 2014. Oil and enamel on composite panel, 130 x 130 cm. Collection of the artist.
In The Spill Series (The Rough Guide 3) (Fig. 39), an aerial orientation shifts to snow crystals or spores in a galactic Petri dish. An eruption appears to occur from behind a membranous plane upon which a mannered gesture sweeps downwards to congeal. This molten avalanche grows tumescent to pierce the picture-plane in a dollop – like cream or car duco. It ranges through ice floes and cloud flows, it threatens to burst.
Fig. 40. Megan Walch, The Spill Series (Extreme Ikebana), 2014-15. Oil and enamel on composite panel, 130 x 130cm. Collection of the artist.
Figures in The Spill Series (Extreme Ikebana) (Fig. 40) coalesce, coagulate and warp. A tangled thicket of calligraphic thonging weaves through painterly slag to exit the picture at simulated speed. These strands of ligature optically suture folds of pink sumo-flesh to surrounding space before piercing the picture plane. I inflate forms to become pneumatic before exploding and shattering them as if shot from the side by a gun in a violent computer game. These splatters sit in unabsorbed tension on the surface of the painting. Figure and ‘ground’ wrestle with one another. Elasticity indicates torsion; there is the possibility that figures might stretch until they fragment and scatter through space. Or they may interpenetrate until their co-mingling creates a new composite. Here the figure- ground distinction is undergoing change – a brutal disfigurement or strangulation.
The figure-ground distinction is fundamental to our visual apprehension of the world. The delineation of form against ‘background’ is used to distinguish objects and renders them visible. If an object cannot be isolated, defined or delineated, it becomes camouflaged. If space is perceived as full and fluid rather than static and empty, it becomes a three-dimensional medium that envelops us. When there is a principle of equivalence, does background or foreground even exist? The figure-ground relationship can be an analogy for how we exist as separate or non-separate from our environment. It is a visual index for defining our sense of self, or lack of it. Contrast creates meaning, and without difference an object has no limits. In Extreme Ikebana, the figure-ground distinction is pliable and undergoing strain.
Fig. 41. Megan Walch, The Spill Series (Tipping Point), 2015. Oil and enamel on composite panel, 130 x 130 cm. Collection of the artist.
In The Spill Series (Tipping Point) (Fig.41), I populated the painterly pour with minute dots that would disperse in a lava-flow before plummeting into a deep geological gash – a plunging dark central void is witnessed from a hovering remove. Fragments like platforms of rock are suspended over the precipice of a gravitational vortex whilst defying gravity. Stretched bands of elastic flesh coalesce in a tangle at the right of the image. Flesh tone is mediated to appear plastic-pink and contrived, as if shining a torch through my hand, or flensing the first layers of skin. Pink struggles with black and black deadens the chroma of any colour that it comes into contact with. These operations are like abstractions of screen energy, containing a psychology of excess that accompanies obliteration and reconfiguration. As with Satellitescape, a vortex allures us to a ruinous attraction, evacuation and expulsion.