These past few years, we have all learned to speak in the dialect of our houses. The strange corners we know to navigate in the dark as we go to the kitchen for a glass of water; the creaks that come steady as the seasons.

I am reminded of all this as I flick through the Hanne Borchgrevink book looking at her houses in all their varying primary colours, or the stark variations on this theme bereft of colour in landscapes of grey and white, indicating winter. Winter, the oldest of the seasons. Even in summer, my mind is preparing for winter. Wintering, hibernating, nesting. Waiting the world out.

The development of Borchgrevink’s art over the years as the houses—though still rooted in real landscapes—become more abstract: losing as they do windows and doors and other features that might indicate actually existing homes. Through this abstraction of her art, the homes become more legible, allowing the viewer to see homes of their own from the place of memory, reality or imagination.

This is the overwhelming power of Borchgrevink’s paintings when confronted with them. To write about one of her houses would seem very much beside the point. It is only by seeing many of them together that a clear sense of her objective comes through. The endless iterations and reiterations, with small changes here and there—to the colour of the roof or the walls of the house—are reminiscent of the writer, perhaps especially the translator of poetry, generating different possibilities through endless slight variation.

The same object

over and over

yet each time

different.

I can make the same dish a hundred times in the kitchen, and it will never be exactly the same.

Borchgrevink’s houses are simultaneously concrete and abstract such that they are open to transfer onto them our meanings and memories of real and imagined spaces. This is where the house as site of metaphor becomes an almost insistent accompaniment to her paintings.

∞

I have always loved the action of the kitchen.

I loved the small tight kitchen of Carrigeen Park, my Granddad’s house, with its big old range in the heart of Waterford city. The kitchen in my family home, also a tight space, even when the extension came and we wondered how we ever fit everyone in before, is where it all seemed to happen to me. People came in for lunch and were gone as quick as whirlwinds. Tea and soup, sandwiches, biscuits and snacks passed around as freely as jokes and laughs. Dinners of occasion and daily ritual. A nest in which we gathered, reassembled. Kitchen tables never seemed to last with all the coming and going in our house. Too much written on and over by the years.

A kitchen table is a doubly creative space.
repetition / variation

Where I roll dough out for bread, and words out for poems. Where words on a page become food on a plate. Meals and sentences intertwine and extend out from one another. Abstraction realised. A place to chop vegetables and words, editing dinner and articles into being.

variation / repetition

 

 

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This is an extract from David Toms’ “Tables.”
Read the full articles in Magma 91, In The Flesh 

 

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