Chloë Louise Lawrence - cutting at lemons for freckles

'cutting at lemons for freckles' at Skippings Gallery,
co-curated by Chloë Louise Lawrence and Sophie Giller.

“The artists were more interested in the textures of everyday life”.

We wanted to put on a show with these twelve female artists, we told them to send what work they could, there were no restrictions, but some requests. All the artists had differing practices in terms of materials, techniques, concepts, but when the work came together in the show, we saw a few unifying themes which were re-imaginings of reality, or giving things potential new life and way to exist, and work in another way. We saw this critical approach from all the artists: each explores how we see, encounter and use things in a social context, and disrupts routine expectations of form and knowledge.

In Djuna Barnes’s short story ‘The Diary of a Dangerous Child’, the protagonist speaks of “cutting into lemons for my freckles”, a visceral image of an attempt to remove ‘blemishes’ and ‘imperfections’ from the skin. When we make art, are we trying to therapise or improve ourselves, or the materials that go into them? Are we trying to make things a better version of themselves?

In this show, the works involve a lot of re-making, repetition and variation, improving, and creating different versions.

The cutting of lemon seemed appropriate for the amount of slicing, trimming, splitting, and cropping in these artists’ practices, whether physically, in the sense of cutting into objects, magazines, fabrics, soaps, or dyed paper, or compositionally in terms of imagery and layers of paint, a cutting or editing process that’s harder to see.

And this chopping and slicing of the lemon for improvement is an apt analogy for the searching and questioning and improving of both the materials of the works, and the artists themselves. By placing themselves in an ongoing critical position vis-a-vis everyday life, these artists continually examine and remake how they see, experience and absorb the world.

1. Neil Annett, ‘Why do artists make prints?’, The Kiss: or Poison Boyfriend: or Jesus’ Blood (London: Kingsgate Project Space, 2017), 15.
2. Djuna Barnes, ‘The Diary of a Dangerous Child’, The Lydia Steptoe Stories (London: Faber & Faber, 2019).