Narbi Price
www.narbiprice.co.uk
@narbiprice
Statement:
During the first COVID-19 lockdown I had noticed a few friends posting pictures online of public benches enrobed with red and white, candy-striped barrier tape, preventing them being used for that for which they were intended. There was a striking kind of three-dimensional calligraphy, how the tape was wrapped around and through the bars and planks of the benches, in a casual quotidian rhythm, making marks in space, different on each bench. Crude but strangely lyrical interventions, each responding to the construction like a Poundshop Christo.
It was absolutely emblematic of the early summer in 2020 - these familiar benches, stuck outside all over the UK, became my everyday focus whilst so many of us were stuck indoors, staying at home. Time’s passage distorted, weeks lasted days, months were as years. As it continued, for better or worse, the tape’s taut bindweed grip relaxed, in parallel with the apparently arbitrary stages of the governmental lifting of lockdown. They began to be removed, or torn away, sun bleached scraps left fluttering in the summer breeze, as a gymnast’s lost ribbon.
The Lockdown Paintings (from which these are taken) captured something of the surreal qualities of the pandemic, the banal melancholy of enforced human separation, and the ever-shifting adjustment of our own sense of normality.
Gradually, the forms regained their function.
www.narbiprice.co.uk
@narbiprice
Statement:
During the first COVID-19 lockdown I had noticed a few friends posting pictures online of public benches enrobed with red and white, candy-striped barrier tape, preventing them being used for that for which they were intended. There was a striking kind of three-dimensional calligraphy, how the tape was wrapped around and through the bars and planks of the benches, in a casual quotidian rhythm, making marks in space, different on each bench. Crude but strangely lyrical interventions, each responding to the construction like a Poundshop Christo.
It was absolutely emblematic of the early summer in 2020 - these familiar benches, stuck outside all over the UK, became my everyday focus whilst so many of us were stuck indoors, staying at home. Time’s passage distorted, weeks lasted days, months were as years. As it continued, for better or worse, the tape’s taut bindweed grip relaxed, in parallel with the apparently arbitrary stages of the governmental lifting of lockdown. They began to be removed, or torn away, sun bleached scraps left fluttering in the summer breeze, as a gymnast’s lost ribbon.
The Lockdown Paintings (from which these are taken) captured something of the surreal qualities of the pandemic, the banal melancholy of enforced human separation, and the ever-shifting adjustment of our own sense of normality.
Gradually, the forms regained their function.
Untitled Bench Painting (Lockdown)
70 x 100cm Acrylic on Panel 2021 |
Untitled Bench Painting (Lockdown) 4
70 x 100cm Acrylic on Panel 2022 |