This practice-based research questions how contemporary painting might respond to mass displacement in Europe. Specifically, what might painting do differently to the documentary photograph with the representation of migrants? How can a painting practice which deploys ambiguity by shifting a documentary photograph’s colours, forms and compositions, engage with the ethics of such representation? By exploring painting's ongoing relationship to the documentary, this research collects, contemplates and attempts to transform the effects of news images in all their fragmented forms on viewers through work on canvas and paper.

Photographs are reimagined as a body of drawings and paintings which reflects on the responsibility of painter and painting to respond to contemporary, political crises. The work situates artist and viewer between the realities of trauma and the pleasures of creating and perceiving images. Materials and forms are manipulated to emphasise ambiguity, moving between charcoal and watercolour, figuration and abstraction, to explore the tensions between individual experience and collective narratives of another’s suffering. I embrace painting as a creative research method, which brings us to new understandings of the displaced body. Chapters include discussions of the social necessity of empathy, ethical modes of making, contemporary and historical trauma painting, and ambiguity’s potential for the depiction of trauma.

Key Words

Trauma, empathy, archive, painting, ambiguity, ethics.

Access the full thesis.

Samantha Wilson’s (b. Dundee, Scotland) figurative drawings and paintings employ visual tensions through ambiguity and the unresolved. Her work contemplates social, political and cross-cultural human experiences, with a recent focus on mass displacement within Europe. Informed by a self-collected photography archive, paintings reimagine the photographic image. Liquid watercolour, powder pigments, charcoal and oil paint are pushed back and pulled forward to reveal and conceal bodies, faces and identities, intentionally straddling abstraction and narrativity. Works explore the ethics of representation, questioning the responsibility of the painter and viewer to respond to contemporary crises and furthermore illuminate the necessity for compassionate relating, regardless of race, age, gender or political status.

Wilson received a BFA and MFA of Fine Art from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee in Scotland and has received many prizes including a John Kinross Scholarship to Florence, an RSA New Contemporaries award, an Eaton Grant and a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust (QEST) grant to pursue her MRes at the Royal College of Art (2022) among others. She wishes to extend this research onto a practice-based PhD to further explore figurative painting's ongoing relationship to the documentary news image and its responsibility to respond to contemporary crises.

...the potential for meaning becomes all the stronger to the extent that painting remains open and ambiguous, resisting the photographic fixations of culture. This is its value, relative to photography. Culture is the objectifying fetishist, served by photographic imagery. Painting is the lover - Richard Shiff, Less Dead (2008)

Marlene Dumas's moral dilemma is ours: try as we may, our choice of action is likely to fail us, if not now, then later. Good intentions are no guarantee that we do "the 'right' thing" - Richard Shiff, Less Dead (2008)

Now that we know that images can mean whatever, whoever wants them to mean, we don't trust anybody anymore, especially ourselves - Marlene Dumas, Suspect (2003)

Excerpt from thesis (Part I - Paintings that listen, then speak)

Empathy

My practice has always been concerned with the generation of empathy, but this has changed over time, becoming softer. I no longer place demands on painting to create empathy implicitly because empathy resides in the individual that feels it, not inside paintings alone.

...Empathy in aesthetics and art is defined as a “state of mind in which someone shares the feelings or outlook of another, sometimes prompted by imaginative exercises such as ‘stepping into someone's shoes’ to empathise with another, by projecting oneself into a painting”. (1) A symposium held at the Association for Art History titled Art and Empathy (n.d.) appropriately declared the pressing need for empathy, especially following a global pandemic and given ongoing civic and political unrest and global injustices. (2) But calls for empathy through artistic practices have surfaced across the ages, and the arts arguably have unique capacities to evoke deep emotional connections across time and culture. (3) In Empathy: What Is It And Why Does It Matter, Professor David Howe explains that if we can empathise with a work of art, our understanding and appreciation of the painting’s subjects or event it depicts increases, and as our bodies resonate with the painted gestures, we become aligned with the emotions of the painting itself. (4)

With this in mind, I consider how paintings can respond to the magnitude of the number of forcibly displaced people in 2022, which reached the highest number ever recorded at over 100 million worldwide, 1.92 million of whom migrated to Europe by the end of 2021. (5) Amidst ongoing global conflicts, natural disasters spurred by climate change and the pressures of globalisation, empathy, now more than ever, is a critical necessity in order to respond. This does not suggest that painting alone can alter the course of crises but rather speculates on how paintings might ethically engage with displacement, and what they might tangibly achieve in doing so. If paintings can move viewers emotionally – a response needed to employ empathy, thereby increasing understanding of others and moving the viewer to take action as if the crises were directly related to themselves – painting can be offered as a suitable, if not necessary, method of engagement with (or at the least, an entry point into aiding) social crises.

...Despite painting’s ability to entice emotions, paintings themselves cannot physically care. They are removed from the situations they depict. Conveying the experience of another’s pain, one which the artist has not lived through, presents ethical questions:

How would the painting’s subjects feel knowing their images were being used?

Do paintings merely aestheticise another’s pain?

Is it moral?

...My motivation to respond to trauma and displacement lies in a visceral and physical concern for witnessing traumatic separations in society and their social consequences. This includes when wars lead to the mass displacement of civilians, forcing them to relocate to other countries, where their disconcerting experience often continues, with degrading treatment inside detention centres and delayed visa processing. The extent to which communities are divided by political and social differences paves the way for much of the suffering and uncertainty humans endure. Painting is a way I can begin to digest and understand such distressing realities. By spending extended periods of time with documentary images of the mass displaced (rather than disregarding or ignoring them) and printing, enlarging and painting these images, I embrace the uncertainty of the individuals I depict. This practice helps me come to terms with the divided cultures we are all, directly or indirectly, a part of creating. Painting leads me to confront the suffering of others and provides me with an outlet to empathise with individuals in uncertain circumstances even though I cannot physically change their reality...

...Paintings may or may not entice empathy, but in their willingness to engage, they hold value in their potential to emotionally connect. For me, to paint with empathy means to tread softly with materials, marks, and compositions; to listen carefully, then speak.

Notes
1. Honderich, Ted. 1995. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press
2. “Empathy and Art.” n.d. Eu.eventscloud.com. Accessed March 23, 2023. https://eu.eventscloud.com/web.../5317/sessions-by-day/ empathy-and-art/.
3. Ibid.
4. Howe, David. 2013. Empathy: What It Is and Why It Matters. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.P.7.
5. “Forced Displacement: Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).” n.d. Civil-Protection-Humanitarian-Aid.ec.europa.eu. Accessed April 2, 2023.

Excerpt from thesis (Part II - Practice & Methods)

The Photographic Archive

Sixty categories and counting.
Images breathe images.

My drawings and paintings take their inspiration from second-hand sources. I began collecting photographs in 2013, which has since developed into an image archive of sixty categories. Photographs took precedence over working with live models because they granted freedom of time and liberated me from the need to depict the model ‘correctly’. Part of the joy of working from photographs was realising I could look for images from any time period, in any subject and combine any number of images together to create new ideas, from the ordinary to the bizarre in a matter of seconds. The freedom to reframe and reimagine photographs presented endless possibilities of what a painting could become, and inspired how I used my chosen materials as well. If source materials could be changed and juxtaposed, so could materials. Water could be poured or splattered onto drawings altering the visual quality of the charcoal. Powder pigments could be dropped into pools of ink that dried into marbled effects on paper. Oil paint could be blended and removed to reveal and conceal faces and bodies to evoke new meanings.

Initially, source materials were not of a specific topic but rather were selected because they moved me emotionally...Thereafter image collecting became more intentional, and following the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe, I collected images of the mass of migrants travelling and arriving in Europe. Viewing thousands of individuals travelling by foot, with uncertain futures and being turned away upon arriving at European borders was unimaginably disturbing. These images found themselves in multiple archived folders that later lead me to this project.

...In our oversaturated image culture, it is easy to scroll rapidly through hundreds of disturbing news images daily and not reflect upon them at all (at least not more than momentarily). Transforming a photograph into a painting offers the painter and viewer the opportunity to stay with the photographed image longer and by extension the incident or individual depicted, thereby shifting the temporality of the image, as well as inventing new possible meanings. Somewhere between the traumatic incident happening in real life, the documentary photograph being taken, catalogued, found and looked at, and re-imagined into a painting, there resides a mysterious unfolding, a place where the artist attempts to make sense of the shattered fragments of human experience, to digest, process and emotionally connect with such that they do not understand...

Mixed media drawings on paper

Portraits and groupings of figurative works on paper are developed in three stages: Primarily identifying the photographs that the image will be based upon. Liquid watercolour, ink, and powder pigments are then dropped into puddles of water on paper on the floor, painting a foundation based on the photograph/s to achieve lively and unrepeatable marks. Powder pigments sprawl apart in the water, forming delicate and invisible qualities, suggestive of ineffable energies of body, mind and spirit. When the ink dries, the painting is hung on the wall, and through a process of mediation, charcoal is placed in and removed, to find faces, limbs and bodies upon the painted base. I intentionally play with a self-inflicted tension, of the solid and the ephemeral, keeping ambiguity in close proximity.

Oil on canvas

Paintings on canvas are comprised in a similar way to the drawings: first by selecting an image or multiple juxtaposed images to form a new composition to work from. Thereafter, I paint a colourful background with abstracted marks, to form the base of the painting, as I want these marks to become visible through the figures/bodies I will later paint on top. This is to generate unexpected elements of colour, texture and depth in the work contributing to ambiguity.

Layered paintings

Smaller studies of mixed media drawings on paper incorporate layers of manipulated tissue paper. The addition of experimenting with tissue paper has extended the visual and conceptual qualities of the displaced body, echoing sentiments of the unknown. The fragility of the materials demands care and gentleness, which contribute to the ethical sensibility in which I approach the images I depict.

Juxtaposition

Juxtaposing photographs are an integral part of the making process: to physically shift both the image and the painting’s narrative by joining sections of multiple images together. This includes mixing figures and limbs with backgrounds or situations across time. More specifically a current example is in joining a traumatic contemporary image with a historical image that depicts caring or devotional gestures. I consider whether this method of image blending could be perceived as a form of care:

An example of this idea in progress is shown below. The juxtaposition shows multiple images of refugees, combined from the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe and groups of refugees fleeing Ukraine in 2022, with an arm from another unknown image and a segment of Jacopo Pontormo’s painting Entombment (the placing of a dead body in a tomb) (1526). I consider that Pontormo’s body being carried could be portrayed to suggest a gesture of care/devotion: a literal depiction of someone being carried. This joining of imagery could visually suggest new meanings, emotions and reminders of necessary human connection and empathy. To visually suggest how we ought to respond to crises, with empathy. I do not suggest this will have a physical effect on the viewer but rather wish to exercise the painting’s capacity to evoke the feeling of empathy. To visualise holding or carrying another amidst difficulty.