Cullinan Richards: A visit to the studio, 9 December 2022, Painting Fluid Thinking1

Abstract

The long-term collaboration of Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards, originally predicated on painting, extends to its studio management; conceptions of work-sharing; design of formats of presentation and exhibition strategy. This raises a question of how far the conception of ‘a painting’ could hold in a context where paintings’ contiguity with boundaries and processes is already a debate arising from variables explored through shared production. The positioning of painting as ‘installation’ further destabilizes the discreet objecthood of a painting resolved within a solidifying frame. Taking up a conception of fluid materiality as a metaphor for this instability, reference is made to both painting and feminist philosophy: Helen Frankenthaler’s development of a painterly language of fluid applications and Luce Irigaray’s terminology of ‘fluidity’ as a physical and discursive interrelation, based in a double experience of feminine physiology. Frankenthaler’s fluid paint and Irigaray’s poetics of fluidity, devised to imagine a non-hierarchical discourse, are contemporaneous but may have no historic connection. The term ‘fluid’, drawn from both these sources, will be used to read an imaginative and purposeful resistance to idealizing the authority of formal explanations of painting present within Cullinan Richards’s practice.