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DIANA COPPERWHITE
Text and Photography by Jacqui McIntosh
Published by Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, 2006
ISBN 0-9552525-2-0

DIANA COPPERWHITE
FLAT EARTH
Photography by Jacqui McIntosh
Published by Kevin Kavanagh Gallery to coincde with ARCO 07, Madrid, 2007
ISBN 978-0-9555164-0-5

DIANA COPPERWHITE
BLIND SPOT
Limerick City Gallery of Art, 2007

Essay from Catalogue:

The Modernist moment was a myth, a mere dream. It seems strange that so many concrete forms emerged from a utopian haze. Instantly recognizable, familiar even, the shapes and hollows of modernist design are scattered throughout contemporary worlds and at times have the evocative power to formulate the structure of memory. Many childhoods for particular generations are looked back at through a prism of modernist space. Traces of these memories are played out in the mind’s flickering eye against backdrops of clear lines and geometric constrictions. In time, Modernism’s supposedly open-ended dream, like so many others before and since, collapsed on its own boundaries. However, the characters that fuelled its dynamism ensured that though the universal project diminished a fractured and brilliantly bright legacy remains. Eileen Gray worked tenaciously in a Parisian apartment until her last moments: such was her desire to create and perpetuate a vision of how living spaces might alter a life’s mood. The process that impels an individual to sustain and realize their view of the world, and their novel intervention in it, defies simplistic divisions between history and the present and between design and art. Diana Copperwhite’s choice to translate Gray’s three-dimensional language into her new painting coexists with her ongoing presentation of a layered vision. As in her previous work the surfaces of Copperwhite’s paintings interweave references from across the spectrum of visual culture: the spheres of film, fine art, design, photography and even microscopic biological images and postcards appear. Some of these visual cues are vociferous in their distinctiveness; others remain quietly oblique, as shadowy presences in a conceptual background. Incorporating many levels of awareness from a philosophical critique of narratives of historical nostalgia to the visual fundamentals of a colour card, Copperwhite stridently delves into a subjectivity that art has wrestled with for centuries, by one name or another. Common to all these aspects is a fascinating intuitive scheme, constantly driven forward by her commitment to the medium of paint. Floating forms seem to move through her paintings. A circle becomes a bubble, a mirror, a face. The rear-view mirror of a car has its view obscured and its form removed from this original context to release it from the constraint of its first function. Transformation of forms and the relationship of idea and appearance move about within these paintings: four heads are actually one. Identity and the appearance of identity are so often the basis for retrospective stories. The film actor reveals this, but we, in a cultural collective sense, are slow to fully recognize its connotations as we blithely write and rewrite history. The connection is lost. In order to tell and hear the ‘story’ of modernism, for example, or even to listen to the telling of a tale of profound shared failure, we insist upon a single identifiable figure. From le Corbusier to Anne Frank, we desire a signature. The conglomeration of shared memory is in this way uncomfortably positioned beside ideas of individual witness. To conceive of the opposite of this is, of course, terrifying. And so, as I look at Copperwhite’s images and enter into their dreamlike state it emerges that there might be, nearby, an imaginative space between such stark methods of history. The gap between the alternatives of autograph and anonymity is suggested here in this parallel painted image-world. Here, I am reminded of many places and people at once: here is a visual space that recalls events and sensations through suspended iconography. It is far from arbitrary that a painting was triggered by the contemplation of a photograph, which in turn depicted an exhibition space containing an interior designer’s work. Foraging through these strata of representation demanded that another be added to demonstrate the randomness of interpretation. In this new presentation various indicative images cohabit in a fluid world of translucent colour and purposeful textures. The whole of it is stretched out in front of me in an open embrace: come into this picture, now, here.
Niamh Ann Kelly, June 2007