The St.Ives New School
Max Andrews
Alexis Zelda Stevens, Untitled, 2005. Courtesy of ArtSway.
The practice that Alexis Zelda Stevens cultivated during her residency at ArtSway, a contemporary gallery deep in England’s New Forest, is precarious and precocious; and it might have begun with a pink-painted tree branch or a dinky green ladder. The branch protruded inelegantly from a deliciously clashing orange painting in Interior Landscape II (2004), one of the works in her painting degree show at the nearby Falmouth College of Arts in Cornwall. The green ladder, salvaged from a skip in the town, became a sort of studio buddy and a totem.
Poking through a gash in the canvas, the candy-pink branch marks a conceptual transition for Stevens’ in her installation at ArtSway. Puncturing the picture-surface started off as a silly, wonky gesture that seemed to mock the seriousness of the task at hand. But it was also a serious provocation to the authority of the canvas, and the breakthrough to the third dimension. The immediacy of the appeal of the green ladder played its part too, suggesting a scavenging approach that could make use of whatever came to hand.
Stevens’ work for ArtSway is an alarming balancing act. Her adoption of unremarkable objects and materials (concrete, timber, chair parts, mirrors, electrical tape, a brightly coloured laundry line) take us well beyond the insistent mysticism of canvas and stretcher. Lengths of timber are daubed with orange gloss paint, somewhat tarred, if not quite feathered , and are suspended or made to lean as if in stress positions. Despite this evisceration (or humiliation) of painting on canvas, Stevens attitude is not precious or coy, nor does it ever abandon painting altogether.
Here the term Plasticism might denote both the compositional ‘science’ of Constructivist ecstasy, and at the same time the evolution of High Density Polyethylene milk bottles into organic forms. Stevens’ use of easily recognisable matter and materials as major elements in otherwise formal arrangements deliberately teases the abstract credibility by the suggestion of narrative interpretations. With the introduction of (real) lights and shadows and the possibility of the viewer acting within them instead of standing passively in front of them, chiaroscuro space becomes a real space that’s somewhat domestic, possibly theatrical and potentially threatening.
Though she studied in Cornwall, it would be disingenuous to suggest that Stevens is a necessarily Cornish artist. The St. Ives School that comprised Peter Lanyon, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron, Barbara Hepworth et. al., remains a forceful and wonderfully over-determined field that looms over the eminent painting departments in the region. But Stevens? first forays away from painting inevitably meddle in their own unassumingly subversive way with the approved lineage of Cornish modern (landscape) painting.
Instead of the greens and blues so evocative of land and sky-sea, she adopts artificial colours: fluorescent puce and orange, emergency yellow and alien green. And Stevens makes constructions and accumulations of painted objects and found materials; working things out in studio space rather than on picture space. Stevens was home schooled until the age of nine (her parents are both artist-educators) under a creative, trans-disciplinary pedagogical technique. The approach favoured by this home-baked Montessori Method is now distilled in Stevens’ unlearning of painting’s phantom curriculum.
