Bitumen paint, metaphor and the performance of self


      ‘time collapses and layers of life flow simultaneously into a mesh of memory and dream’

        Eleanor Antin

 

I ‘discovered’ bitumen paint in 2006. I wanted something black and cheap to paint a pram for an installation. Afterwards I started experimenting with it. Simply used for waterproofing sheds, it is dark, viscous, treacly, and smelly until dry. I discovered that when dripped from a stick it will create depth and when it is the right thickness or viscosity, it will spin and create beautiful patterns. Each line of bitumen dripped from a stick can be fluid and continuous creating unique curvilinear figures and forms. As the paint is dripped from a stick there is a lack of control, so as a process it involves chance and failure. There are always dribbles and mistakes and repetition or replication is impossible. Each mark is made by the body, hand to eye, and eye to hand. It is gestural and performative and no matter how good I get, there is an element of flow and failure in every repeated pattern.


Dripping bitumen in my studio, photo: Rick Davey
 Film credit: Artist's Film by Florence Browne

Historically many artists have worked with bitumen as it has unique properties, one of which is, it never completely ‘sets’. The pitch-drop experiment measures the flow of a piece of pitch over many years. Bitumen is a kind of pitch substance that is a highly viscous liquid but appears solid.  I liked the idea of bitumen as a metaphor for change and movement over time.  It became a metaphor for the multiplicity of self and selves, containing possibilities for the fluidity of selfhood and gendered Subjectivity; the potential to make visual the stories we ‘spin’ about our selves; to reveal the drips and lines of our lives that are never simple or singular. Simply it is a metaphor for flow and change.

The act of creation, 40x40cm, Delpha Hudson, 2017 

I developed a project called Liquid Selves, linking the process of dripping bitumen to work about the politics of selfhood and female identity and wrote a book ‘Liquid Selves: The fragmentary and multiple nature of self’ (2011) about escaping from categorization to promote the philosophical idea of ‘becoming’ (Kristeva, Deleuze et al).  These early monochrome figures and forms created through the bitumen drawing process expressed non-narratable selves, undoing identity in order to put our differences together.


Front cover of Liquid Selves book 

 My performance and film practice has always promoted differentiated representations of women and mothers that promote visibility and value. The physical processes and gesture involved in dripping bitumen paint always felt performative. Over the years many people have mentioned Jackson Pollock and his ‘action painting’ where he dripped industrial paint on canvas in a gestural way. There is a link to this classic ‘expressive’ and performative bodily act in my own painting, but I would prefer people to reference ‘drip painter’ Janet Sobel, who got there first (look her up, she isn’t as famous but she was painting in a similar way before Pollock and his work references hers. Like many women she was overlooked so you may not have heard of her).


Janet Sobel working in her studio

I love Pollock’s unique works but my own process of dripping is a very different one. I create figurative works that are carefully planned and have very different conceptual – the opposite in fact of Pollock’s grand genius gesture, as these paintings are about undervalued, everyday motherhood, domestic and gender issues.

HER-IT, 50x40cm, 2009, one of the first bitumen paintings
with figures connected squiggly creatures that are not pets! 

Bitumen is a changeable material and has properties that mean that it won’t last forever. After about 100 years the acids in the bitumen will start to destroy the canvas. When I began using it I had no idea how long paintings would remain stable. After over 10 years I know that nothing immediately happens – which is very reassuring for painting sales, although initially I did sell paintings with a ‘bitumen disclaimer’ ensuring that purchasers knew that as a ‘conceptual’ painting medium they should not hang it next to a radiator (this is true of any painting)! 


Bitumen text on wood for Saw Sings, 
performance with Nigel Bispham, Acorn Theatre, 2016 

Molasses drip by the artist Artcore Gallery, Derby, 2019  

Over time I have developed different processes, including adding layers of gesso and sanding the bitumen and I have used it for many projects including writing, poetry, creating layers of word and image. I have also experimented with the same technique of dripping with other ephemeral materials like honey or molasses. These can be photographed or documented but sadly never kept or fixed. Automatic and deliberate painting processes can create aggregates of vernacular imagery, myth and archetype that create modes of escape and becoming for all the people we are and can be. Our ‘selves’ and our stories are never fixed.


Written in Honey, performance-installation, 
Helmsley Castle, 2002




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