Gillian Chaplin and Barbara Tuck

Prints and an Installation
Photographic Dreams

GORDON H. BROWN

In her handling of the photographic print Gillian Chaplin has always aimed at a type of visual precision that is proper to the picture-making qualities of photography. Her endeavours have been accompanied by an almost dualistic approach to her choice of subjects. In this respect she is a photographer with an urge to become directly involved in the picture-making process. She is never an impersonal eye functioning through the lens of a camera. Even at her simplest, where the imagery is accepted as it is found, her eye is selecting its most elemental aspect as an image while also imposing on it a chaste, highly formalized visual pattern. Yet, for all this emphasis on the organized visual properties that can be made accessible through the camera lens when used with discretion and intelligence, Gillian Chaplin also seeks to inject other, less tangible qualities, into her photographic prints. This is why she is both a picture-maker and a photographer.

When fully applying her skills, the dualistic element in her work amalgamates to reveal a talent that seeks to extend her world beyond the confinements of the visible. This is done without denying that the meaning she wants to convey still needs to remain anchored to the visible world. Her manner of conveying intangible qualities through visible means can be gently contrived, as in her 1975 portrait of Angela Maynard. Here the objects that accompany this seemingly uncomplicated image of Angela Maynard are not just visual accessories but combine to state something very pertinent about the personality of the woman portrayed. Such a combination of formal qualities with what is symbolized characterizes the best in Gillian Chaplin's photographic portraits. Often the duality is more forcibly imposed, as in her Self-Portrait III of 1977 or of Anne Noble, Albert Park (1978). The poetic qualities found in such prints as these reflect a tendency that has become increasingly obvious in her recent work.

The extent to which the duality in Gillian Chaplin's approach can be separated and divided between the concrete image and the poetic overtones of insubstantial forces, was clearly demonstrated in her exhibition of Circles and Dreams at RKS Art, last year. It was an exhibition that brought into the open her best qualities as well as the less favourable ones.

In those prints where Gillian Chaplin confines her vision most directly to the unambiguous image, the broad, simplified forms she seeks are often enhanced by a few precisely defined details. In a set of prints titled Attachment, softly-shaded sections of the bow or stern of a yacht's hull are shown together with the yacht's mooring rope. This rope acts as an important motif in providing an interesting linear pattern. Indeed, these prints rely on this superimposed sense of strong, simplified design to render them wholly effective. But, for all the skill displayed in such prints, their contribution to the viewer's experience of the visual world is not exceptional. Nor were the large collages of combined xeroxed images, shown in the same exhibition, exceptional. Collages of this sort are often tried by photographers but rarely are they truly successful. While some of these collages retain a marginal interest, they are strongest when their poetic qualities are supported by a securely organized visual pattern such as the repetitive motif in Moon Dance.

Where Gillian Chaplin's abilities as a photographic picture-maker come to the fore is in her series of twelve xerox prints called In the Blood of the Wound - Dream Series (1983), and in her sets of colour photographs, each composed from three prints, in which the themes are highly symbolic. For all their evocative qualities, these Circles and Dreams are not easy to interpret. They do, however, contain certain semi - contradictory elements that have their origins in Gillian Chaplin's Self-Portrait I and Self-Portrait III of 1977. The most obvious of these elements is the dichotomy between the 'natural' image and that belonging to the work of art.

It is not the formal elements in themselves that create this sense of uncertain meaning but what is implied by the images upon which this formality depends. On the whole each image is precise and, in isolation, unambiguous. But in the juxtaposition of their arrangement they acquire an allegorical essence which requires that each individual image must be seen as forming a vital part within the total pictorial framework of the complete series of which a single print is but a part. To a limited extent the general direction in which the meaning of each set of prints is heading was supplied in a quotation from the Nor Hall that was printed as part of the publicity for the exhibition. This concerned the serpent that, in Norse mythology, circled the earth by holding its tail in its mouth. Called Uroboros, this snake ring contained all the 'possibilities of male and female, beginning and end, life and death'. Uroboros became 'that quality of being cosmically "held" or protected within a magic circle that one is little capable of cracking until a door is opened from the outside, or until one sees something that forces a new way of thinking - one that urges breakthrough'.

The tenuous implications of such a theme are most clearly evident in a Dream sequence of twelve xerox prints, titled In the Blood of the Wound. The semi-formed images emerge out of a dark, slightly dull, negative space is if projected forward in an attempt to give them a more positive shape. The tendency for the middle range of tones to dominate helps to stress the dream quality of the series. Nearly present in the shadowy background is the head of a sleeping, dreaming woman. Her hands gain greater prominence as if either shaping or guiding or clinging to the images that are touched or formed by her fingers. Among the dominant images are those of an egg, of birds or parts of birds such as wings or the bare bones - some tied in bundles, or the image of a snake. The sequence suggests the processes of birth and of dying; the cycle of regeneration.

In the triptych-type sets of colour photographs Gillian Chaplin has, in effect, constructed tableaux in which every image is held in a precise position within a well disciplined pictorial framework. Nothing accidental occurs. Each image, and every detail in each image is taut, well focused and thoughtfully staged. On the surface everything is factual, yet at the same time this illusion of reality is fictitious, the furnishing for an artificially contrived allegory.

Within each set of three photographs there exists a tightly organized pictorial relationship. Not only are the images conditioned by the thematic tenor of each set, but the general distribution of the imagery, and the way the imagery is controlled by the over-all design of each set as it forms a triptych is disciplined, in nearly every instance, by a rigorous symmetry. The two outer prints assume an almost identical format, often with certain features contrasting with the pictorial arrangement of the central print. In this way the balance and economy of the pictorial elements add a sense of grace as well as the aspect of surprise to each sequence. These features are well illustrated in Tapas (1983). In the two outer prints a woman's head is shown in profile, viewed partly through an open-ended, hollow cube-like box. Most of the head is tightly-bandaged. Only the face remains uncovered. One major difference distinguishes one print from the other. Whereas one head is seen from, the left side, the other is shown from the right. Thus both face inward toward the central print. In the central print the see-through box-shape is pushed to one side. What is shown of the woman is the upper part of her torso and her arms. Her head, being beyond the edge of the print, is not visible. The torso is devoid of clothes. One breast is clearly visible, but the other is hidden beneath a swathe of bandages. As a related set of images, all are photographed in a detached yet frank manner.

The intention is clearly allegorical. But what exactly are the terms of reference by which the allegorical signs are to be read? From a formal viewpoint, these prints are well crafted and, in an internal sense, the images within each Sequence are well integrated. However, the ideas that give to each sequence its credence remain almost entirely dependent on the photographer's own personal feelings for the images created. There the images remain, introspective, private, and too shy to enter completely the public domain. For all their evocative qualities, the internal clues that these photographs possess remain too tenuous for the viewer to gain an appreciation that is both satisfactory, and reliable as an interpretation. Certainly, the viewer can conjure up some sort of meaning, but this can only be done by reading into the images the photographer has provided an arbitrary interpretation that is external to the evidence provided by the prints themselves. Yet, to accept the images simply as divorced from what they were created to convey, or to construct an interpretation of their meaning when this construction is entirely reliant on guesswork, is the dilemma these dream-like sequences of prints present to the viewer.

Allegory is a difficult medium. Its success relies on the availability of the clues its creator provides for revealing its veiled meaning.

POSTSCRIPT
The above was written after Gillian Chaplin's exhibition at RKS Art, but before her exhibition with Barbara Tuck, Double Doors, opened at the Auckland City Art Gallery.

Although works in a different medium establish their own criteria, many of the admirable qualities found in Gillian Chaplin's photographs also inhabit her small assemblages of carefully arranged and intriguing mixture of often fragile objects. Yet, while the difficulties of communication mentioned in the latter part of my article still persist, they are for the most part less acute. To some extent this ambiguity has been largely overcome by the content of delicate feeling aroused in the viewer when contemplating these compilations of assembled objects, and by a more acute sense of metaphor that exists between the juxtaposed objects in their role as images.