Mignon Steele describes the shapes that emerge in her work as familiar enough to have names – banana peel, bottle, mushroom. As ways of working, these forms have hung around from earlier painting days but are boiling up again, remixed at new scales. She loops around them, shifting their depth and discernment, using them as a grounding force for new work. The shapes range – from protozoan creatures to the other end of the scale – suggesting repetitions from tiny imprints to the galactic. It’s not so much a language as it is a codex of marks and habits and ways of working that are revisited, carved out or newly summoned.
The organisation of the smaller works is described by the artist as “like little terrains, aerial worlds, models, landscapes”. Being more a feeling for landform than a mapping, Mignon Steele has built up areas with recycled yellow pages bound with wood glue. She refers to these accretions of surface as “hedges or stone walls” that push toward the sides. At times they form a sculptural frame. In other instances they are like a collection of fields, some tended, others lying fallow. It’s a kind of feeling out through painting to the edges of things, building up in parts, then pushing back down, the work eroding so that the surface is weathered to something geological. As viewers, we might fall off the edge only to discover that the sides of the paintings are also addressed, with a suggestion that the work just keeps on going, expanding and breathing through layers of colour. Opaque tints of yellow refuse to disappear under rich sepia reds shifting to magenta. Wild colour laps up against the edges of these papier maché fields, washing back to expose submerged hues beneath.
Running Woman refers to a ponytailed jogger that Mignon Steele notices when travelling between studio and home: “I see her as a kind of talisman, a spectral figure. I haven’t resolved what it means to see her yet, but I know it means something.” An inspiration, a tender touchstone, a consistency but also a metaphor, they might appear to the artist along a path, at the supermarket, or on a trail. Running woman is an emerging form in the artist’s way of working, landing somewhere between the micro-organisms and the celestial pinpoints that populate the work.
In the paintings on linen, Steele invites us to “get inside them a little more”. These larger works relate more to the scale of the body and, with a few cues (like a discernible ground plane or horizon), we can gather pictorial readings. They are initiated rapidly and have what the artist describes as a “stage-like quality” where she visits habitual forms like the blue-red mushroom or a book, banana peels and diatoms (plankton).
One large work on linen, Sitting Woman, uses that same earthy red as Running Woman but here it is pushed back by various tints of blue-green. Works like these have a direct connection to the drawing practice the artist continues in the evening and then brings to the studio. These paintings are “an extension of a language of shapes and voids and sensibilities that starts in a sketchbook and is elaborated on with paint and time.”
The eponymous Running Woman painting reminds Mignon Steele of the Marcel Duchamp glass piece, “The Bride Stripped Bare”, specifically in the way the forms stand quite upright or collage-like. In Steele’s work, the shapes are organised as an earthy mid-ground in front of blue. She joked in its casual process of making that it was “the banana stripped bare” (there’s that banana peel again). But as the work resolved itself, this informal title fell away. Humour is used as levity in a perplexing world where disaster and dilemma are prodded by human impacts. Steele describes a combination of feelings and thoughts around “nature, earth, perils and then funny stuff that cracks me up a bit”. It’s there in the titles – something lighter used as a brace but also an invitation to look further and let the works build their heavy scope in your own time as a viewer. An example, “Legless lizard”, is a gentle start that allows the work to emerge as complex over time, embedded with painterly problems, hopeful glimpses and partial resolutions.
Melody Willis