The Vignette
Artist in Residence at Hamilton MAS, Felixstowe Heritage Seafront Gardens
Tuesday 16th June 2020
The parterre, Heritage Seafront Gardens, Felixstowe June 2020. Digital pinhole image
Today promised a rare Mediterranean sky and searing temperatures. Armed with a sketchbook and a home made pinhole camera for my smart phone, I ventured to the large parterre garden at the North end of the Seafront gardens. I have become increasingly captivated by the parterre gardens since drawing the 1930’s Valentine’s postcard image of them.
Perhaps the water parterre in Villa Gamberaia is echoing gently in their design and as a result I feel nostalgia and connection with that Italian gem of a garden.
My first foray into making a digital pinhole camera proved to be an exciting motivation for the day. Using a small piece of black card taped over the lens, the view finder becomes a fuzzy vignette and as some light was allowed to leak through the edges, I quickly learned how to increase or reduce the atmospheric light leakage to my advantage.
The vignette was a popular creative tool for Victorian photographers to exploit when designing seaside garden postcards. It also reminds me of 1970’s camera wizardry on Top of the Pops.
Magic.
Rather than being converted to a rectangle, every corner of the garden is visible through a circular window. It feels like walking though a succession of Edwardian postcards as I move through the garden.
Edges are important: certainly in my drawing and painting I am acutely aware of the meeting point between the painted image and the boundaries of the hosting support.
Recently the circular ‘tondo’ format has seemed the right way to explore images of remembered gardens rather like a lens or portal offering a different sort of access to a garden. No beginning and no end, the image pulls the viewer in like a camera lens.
Dr. Matt Bowman wrote about my work in his 2019 essay Ground Graspings- Heideggerian reflections on Painting as Terrain to accompany the exhibition at St. Marylebone Church Crypt in London April 2019:
The canvases selected for the exhibition visually suggest formal gardens for stately homes. Her use of circular frames and depiction of a certain degree of optical distortion serves also to suggest those gardens as if viewed from a camera obscura. Indeed, whilst common experience is familiar with photographs being either framed within solid rectangular or square shapes, the photographic image, because of the lens, is actually bordered by a circular, fuzzy periphery. It is only centuries of pictorial convention originating from the history of painting, as well as the desire felt by early photographers for their medium to be accepted within the hallowed academic system of the arts, that led to the reconfiguring of the photographic frame as square or rectangular. Frederick, on this score, in effect reverses the historical development by making the photographic image the condition of painting rather than vice versa.
While the comparison might appear an odd one, Frederick’s paintings loosely recall the formal garden scenes in Alain Resnais’ extraordinary film Last Year at Marienbad (1961).10 The link is not altogether eccentric as both exhibit a fascination with memory on the cusp of amnesia within a dreamlike context. Place in both cases is not so much remembered as borderline forgotten. Yet if Resnais’ film arguably pivots upon a hidden, semi-unrecalled trauma, then it is not obvious that there is a comparative mnemonic darkness in Frederick’s paintings. Instead, memory becomes all the more uncertain, as suggested by the quasi-optical distortions that blur garden, architecture, and sky together in such a manner that the careful rationalized arrangements typical of formal gardens are virtually lost. These blurrings, or mergings, offer various hermeneutic possibilities that bridge the lens-based circle of confusion with the fluidity of painting beholden to centrifugal force. They also implicitly evoke Siegfried Kracauer’s 1927 essay “Photography” in which a tension emerges between the perfect visual creation but amnesiac qualities of the photographic image and the perceptually inexact but subjectively authentic “memory-image.”11 The camera obscura, however, is not (yet) the photograph- producing camera; the images produced by the camera obscura are fleeting, always indexed to a present that remains ever restless, gone when the moment has passed, and thus left as an imprecise vestige of a place within memory.
The pools, Heritage Seafront Gardens, Felixstowe June 2020. Digital pinhole image
