Reflecting on her time at the Roberts Institute of Art Residency and her research interests, Francesca Mollett created a visual essay, drawing together her thoughts around natural phenomena and the cultural influences that have impacted her work.
Notes on lichen
I start my first day looking at the walls of the gatehouse. Lichen seems to appear and disappear at different points on the surface, as if the wall has depth. It is like looking into the surface of a pond flecked with soft debris — leaves, petals, insects or reflections — where elements rise to the surface or are hidden below.
The proximity of lichen to the wall reminds me of the writer and artist, Tavi Meraud’s idea of the spatiality of intimacy: ‘that ineffable quality of closeness’ bringing about interior depth. The crustose lichens on the stone of the gatehouse, produce the effect of a vast cosmos, their glowing moon-like rings and dappled movement produce a shimmering illusion of scale and possibility.
The circular outline of the thallus, the lichen body, is eroded in places. A slow fade from a dark line to an interior which is the same colour as the wall. The lichen confuses the stability of the stone’s apparent wholeness.
The inside of the wall that curves towards the doorway is sheltered, the lichen much paler; wetness makes the contrast between the lichen and the wall more apparent. The wall itself is a slow sparkle of dusty speckled lichen in an indefinite purple-brown, another colour hard to name.
When I look away from these subtle interactions of pigments, red autumn leaves seem too strong against the steel gate inflected with moss, which has made black paint seem grey.
Turning back, I see that now the wall itself is more obviously many-coloured, almost tie-dyed. Behind the first grey, there is a glow of industrial reddish-pink, with a meteor-like bleed of orange.
Golden, the grey-white cloud lichens make hood-like shapes that cup the texture of the wall. Others look like dyed felt and show a gradual green tinge, a gradient that, closely observed, is tight with minor changes.
Moving away, there is a distinct entity that resembles a flower with circles of miniscule stamens, or the tops of mushrooms.
Shimmers
Lichens create effects of shimmering in the landscape around here at Cortachy. Although lichen here isn’t iridescent as such (though there are individual species that are iridescent or bio-luminescent) it can confuse our perception of surface and light. Lichens’ qualities disturb how material is recognised, as they ‘liken’ one surface to another.
Lichens are extensions of surfaces.
Backgrounds
Does lichen camouflage, or make visible? It can draw attention to surfaces of bodies you might not notice, enhance or exaggerate shifts in texture or volume, extending or decorating it; yet it also conceals insects, providing a variegated background for them to rest and feed in.
Shining
Lichens, a symbiosis of algae and fungi, have an intermittent existence; extremely resilient, they can dry out until they receive water again, and then ‘all their colours begin to shine, especially the greens of the algae… this ‘pulsing’ between dry and wet periods is the rhythm distinctive to the life of lichens’ (Vincent Zonca).
Witnesses
Chromatic shifts occur in lichens and mosses, as they use the water they receive immediately, and do not store it. This process, ‘Poikilohydry’ (from ‘poikilos’ and ‘hydro’) allows them to survive in conditions many other plants could not withstand. They are witnesses to instability, embodying slowness and reaching back into time.
Kinnoull Hill
I fanned out the charts from my bag. The British Lichen Society group told me to put them away; you need many hands when identifying lichen. The microscope’s lens needed to be close to the branch, and its extraordinary focus reveals the many tubular and twisting edges as we decide whether we can see isidia or soredia — granular means for propagation within lichen.
Chemical colour
Spray the lichens with water, and you can identify them by seeing how they change colour. As another test of identification, potassium, bleach and other chemicals can be painted on. We watch grey-green brighten into vermillion.
Lichen walk
I showed Margaret from the British Lichen Society the skin of some luminous bark on my phone, one I thought seemed particularly beautifully integrated. She told me that slugs likely made some of those marks, trails where they had eaten the apothecia — the cup shaped structures that release spores.
Intimate Space
I imagine the gesture of foliose lichens towards their support, which Vincent Zonca calls a ‘light caressing motion’, as an intimate space between the thallus (the body of the lichen) and its substrate. The rhizines (the multi-cellular attachment structure) gently fasten, not parasitically withdrawing nutrients as roots do, but using it purely as a support — for touch. Whilst the thallus (Zonca likens it to a tongue) receives water, the organism is turned toward the air for ambient nutrients.
Vestiges
Drawing in fog and mist and atmosphere, lichens also bear a relation to water in their physiological make-up. As partially algae, they are ‘vestiges of the original aquatic world’ (Pierre Gasgar, quoted in ‘Lichens’); within their tiny scale they hold a vastness of the marine inland. Lichens grow on surfaces as varied as bark, leaves, stone, plastic, metal, asphalt, plastic, pine needles, soil, even sand, which continually gives way so that they curl and clump together.
Rivers
Every morning, I cross between the gatehouses and see the river South Esk. Lichens extend where forms of water beside the river can be visible. The almost-blue trail of lichens down one trunk becomes a stream, vertical to the river’s horizontal flow. The river peters out into pools you can walk amongst.
Entries
The surroundings emerge unexpectedly at times through flickers of dark paint, or a new kind of smudged, back and forth mark appearing, like the hovering at dusk here, a kind of looking through light rain.
Reekie Linn
At ‘Reekie Linn’, the waterfall materialises rapidly along the walk, unusually accessible, from the viewpoint of a high gorge with tangled roots. The word ‘Reekie’ is from Victorian times, meaning ‘smoke’ or ‘mist’, and ‘Linn’ is Gaelic for dark pool. Mist rises and the water seems black.
Fêtes Galantes
An eighteenth-century Watteau painting in the Scottish National Galleries of Art, Fêtes Vénitiennes shows a group of men and women in a tamed landscape; the brush marks of the clothes are the most defined element in the softly painted scene, creased light and folds inscribing the directions of looks between them. A nymph softly painted wet in wet in a waterfall is amused by their romantic games.
Lichen appearances
Landscape and nature were subjects in East Asian Art long before they were a subject of interest in the West. And so, whilst lichen is mostly absent in Western painting, lichen appears depicted in different periods in East Asia, from hanging usneas in the tenth-century Song period in China, to the foliose lichens in the Edo Period in Japan. In Ogata Korin’s Red and White Blossoming Plums the filigreed trunks are a kind of fluid camouflage, more mobile than the stylised river.
Lichen points
Vincent Zonca notes that conditions of abstraction arose from the continuation of writing into image. In some images, the calligraphic mark reduces lichen to a ‘small dark stroke’, called a lichen point or moss point (tai dian) in Chinese pictorial nomenclature. The detail of a moss or lichen point is folded into how a brush mark moves through a scene to describe it equally; its representation is hidden but indispensable.
Tarashikomi
Another technique that emerged was a tarashikomi. ‘The artist applied a layer of colour (or drops of ink, water, or pigments) on a surface already painted with water and still moist in order to create a blurred effect (that ‘disturbance’ in things) and a vibrant tone’ (Zonca), the texture becomes a place of imaginative projection, a background that the artist then works with.
Formlessness
Trinh T. Minh-Ha writes about how Chinese visual arts focus on the formless and the spirit (ch’I) which could also be thought of as a quality of being alive. The search for form is found to hold the formless. In Shih-T’ao principles, the painting is the yugen, translated as ‘subtle profundity’ or ‘deep reserve’. The quality emphasised is the ability to imply, rather than to expose something in its entirety: to suggest and evoke, rather than to ‘delineate laboriously’. She writes, ‘such works enable us to imagine the depth of content within them and to feel infinite reverberations, something that is not possible with the detail painted minutely and distinctly’.
Corrie Fee
A glacial bowl where the image of the mountains feels grainy, the black and white mountains and snow make colours appear more noticeable, a bleeding outline of ochre marks where water seeps into boggy land.
Camouflage fungi
Spirals of a knotted root stump are mimicked in the curves of a mushroom appearing as bark, extending the surface into the landscape with its pied body.
Voices
‘Women’s voices, because of the irregularity of their appearances, are apprehended in different tempos, at different speeds. They grab, hold on, break the flow. But this interplay of switching on and off also exposes an anxiety: What to say? How to say it? Speaking reveals inadequacy, silence, solitude, hesitation.’ (Clara Schulmann)
Hesitation
In ‘Chicanes’, Clara Schulmann writes about how within ‘‘My Emily Dickinson’, Susan Howe counters ‘confident masculine voices’ with the notion of a singularly female hesitation, like a paradoxical driving force: ‘HESITATE’, from the Latin, means to stick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty speaking.’ So the hesitation comes from speech, orality. Is there a way to hesitate in writing?’ How are paintings hesitations?
Contingency
My paintings display hesitations; rather than holding singular gestures they accumulate impressions. Indecision results in a kind of contingency, and like camouflage, I then mimic the contingent marks in a continuation of surface.
Appearing/disappearing
I read ‘The Baudelaire Fractal’ by Lisa Robertson in the summer. She speaks of finding an image to write from and how that image should be ‘the self-given permission to not disappear to oneself’. A question of appearing or disappearing can be intended, held onto. Painting is a way of disappearing to myself, and describing is a way to appear.
Traces
I describe surfaces — describe the surface of something seen, and in turn this becomes describing what a surface of a painting does; I constantly highlight the way surface can act in a painting, reinforcing it, pointing to it. The painting bears traces of a movement towards a subject each time and what paint does to that subject.
Floor patterns
In Anne Bogart and Tina Landau’s Viewpoints, a book about a particular philosophy and practice of choreography, the topography of the stage space is thought about in terms of densities of returning movements: ‘To understand floor pattern, imagine that the bottoms of your feet are painted red; as you move through the space, the picture that evolves on the floor is the floor pattern that emerges over time.’
Spangled membranes
’Spangled’ (poikilos) is a sparkling membrane. The abstraction I work within involves creating a membrane: a fluid for its pieces to exist in. The painting is seen as immediate, ‘all at once’ and then uncovered; the wholeness and the partial always in tension.
The shimmer
An image of something splitting and appearing in the same moment. The shimmer as interior sensation, as a form of recognition, and as an actual visual phenomenon that emerges and disguises.
A shimmer is an image through which to look at perception.