Madeleine Peters’ richly tonal oil paintings unlock fragmented narratives and expose time shifts, offering a sequence of compelling settings. In Nurse Ogilvie’s Bedsheets, Madeleine Peters makes visible female archetypes that are often sidelined – the working woman and the woman in a caring role. Through a practice of binding pictorial and verbal recollections, the images emerge as an instinctive response with an awareness of the limits of representation. She sees photo albums as serving as memory jolts, the images providing a touchstone for a more elaborate verbal recollection.
The artist speaks of “how people are held inside each other’s memories,” and in this instance she has gleaned tenderly from the life of her grandmother. The identity of Nurse Ogilvie is at the blurred edges of family memory, a woman working in a World War 2 field hospital and fondly remembered as “Fluffy” Ogilvie by the artist’s grandfather, a Royal Air Force Surgeon. With that entry point, the paintings move beyond any deliberate storytelling. The use of grey tone is a binding mechanism and the expression of fabric becomes metaphorical as it changes states – bedsheets gathered up against the sky, folded precisely or covering the breakfast table. When scattered on the beach the cloth responds to a jagged landscape and rolling clouds. The fold of the sheets signals the importance of detail, gesture and attention.
Madeleine Peters’ work acknowledges the gaps and false truths of any kind of image construction. Her paintings remain open for reading. We see a woman occupied in her carriage as the train pushes through the landscape, moving across territory, creating a non-place between motion and stasis. In another image, the boiled eggs offer a memory flash of an everyday breakfast, the mundane linked to the memorable – in this case, her grandmother’s recollection of the end of war.
Nurse Ogilvie’s Bedsheets offers historical context for a politics of care that has gained a new relevance. Madeleine Peters describes a practice of setting things right in her images and in this context, the bedsheets become a metaphor for a kind of psychological tidying. The alterations made in these paintings come with a kind of melancholic understanding that the past can never be reached. These are not portraits. The archetype moves in and out of visibility, at times a cipher, and then with such clarity as the memory of someone deeply loved.
- Melody Willis
