Room for the homeless                                               

Ten passages and five apropos on the art of Marilyn Ann Owens

Nina M. Schjønsby and Halvor Haugen

I

Every three years

Marilyn Ann Owens was born in Durham in the north-east of England. Owens is a Welsh name. Her ancestors moved from Wales to England sometime in the late 1800s and found work in the mines there. During World War II, Owens's father was a tail gunner with the air force. When peace came, he and other working-class soldiers had the opportunity to climb the social ladder. Owens's father got a job as a policeman. The choice of profession meant that many came to regard him as a class traitor, and neither he nor his family were part of the local community any longer. It also meant that they had to move to a new town every three years, and often the children of the family were not allowed to play with the others in the street. Growing up, Owens lived in a number of industrial towns: Peterlee, Winlaton, Whickham and Stockton-on-Tees – and later more rurally in Ingleton and Langton. New places, new school uniforms. Among all these upheavals and tribulations, she met some good teachers who encouraged her to study art. From 1968 until 1972 she studied painting and graphic art at the Sunderland School of Art and Design.

The little red roofs where the bombs will fall, 1980.

A recurring motif in Owens's art is the kind of red brick houses typical of the towns of her childhood. Either standing alone in the landscape, or joined up in a long, long line. The work's title is taken from the book Coming up for Air, written by George Orwell in 1939. In the book, we meet a middle-aged man in England just before World War II is about to break out. Seeking to escape to something safe and stable, he returns to his childhood town. In Owens's print, the sky is eerie, looming large above, while the row of houses, with all their realistic and recognisable details, feels exposed and vulnerable.

II

Open windows

The room has no exhaust vent, so the windows are kept open. The smell of black varnish and a whiff of nitric acid fills the room; the breeze carries some of it away. We are in the graphic arts workshop at the Sunderland School of Art and Design. The year is 1968. It is a time of upheaval. There is no room for crocus painters here, says the professor. New conversations, new books. Owens wants to tell true stories, so she goes from house to house in the neighbourhood asking people what they dream about. Surely you need to know that if you are going to tell someone's story?

A carefully coordinated collaboration takes place in the workshop. And narratives unfold through the printing press; it becomes a tool for processing them. Ink fills the incisions in the metal plate, and the paper picks up the colour from the depths of its furrows. A subject from her student days comes up again and again in Owens's art: the view from a window.

In From the Window, 1969, we are placed in a room with a view, we are inside, we are observers. A scene unfolds out in the outside world. This time it looks quite idyllic, with pastures, scattered deciduous trees and a house. And at the same time we meet the gaze of another house – its window – looking straight at us. The scene is taken from the last place Owens lived before she moved to Sunderland to study. Later, countless other such scenes will unfold. Like the gamut of emotions experienced in life.

First apropos: Confession and processing

What does it mean to make therapeutic art? The adjective 'therapeutic' has been among the most negative appellations in art criticism's vocabulary. The accusation that someone might be using art to process their own experiences, traumas, unpleasant things that ought to have remained private: taboo topics, such as mental health and sexuality, private confessions that are too intimate, too self-absorbed.

In a 1959 review of the American poet Robert Lowell's poetry collection Life Studies, M.L. Rosenthal launched the term 'confessional poetry', which would subsequently be applied to a number of English-language poets in the 1960s, among them Sylvia Plath. In the review, Rosenthal provides a telling summary of what he called Lowell's 'self-therapeutic motive': 'It will be clear that my first impression while reading Life Studies was that it is impure art, magnificently stated but unpleasantly egocentric – somehow resembling the triumph of the skunks over the garbage cans,' he writes. Despite the image of skunks rooting out the trash in the streets, Rosenthal was favourably disposed to Lowell's poetry collection because it had other qualities that overcame the 'therapeutic' aspects.

The terms confessional poetry and confessional art are related to the religious idea of confession – you share something you would not otherwise share in order to cleanse yourself and receive forgiveness in return. But perhaps much confessional and therapeutic art is not really about a desire for forgiveness, but rather about demanding acceptance from the public. This demand for acceptance is perhaps most clearly formulated in Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions from the 1780s. In the introduction, Rousseau defends his right to publish something as self-centred as a book about himself and his own unique individuality: 'I have studied mankind and know my heart; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality'.

Much of the confessional art after Rousseau, Lowell and Plath has had a fairly explicit desire to break away from the shame nurtured by secrecy – the shame associated with coming from where you come, being where you are and being who you are.

.

Frikvarter, 1982

Provincial She-creature with Critics and Crocodiles, 1986

The Flood, 2002

III

An attic of one's own

She wants to depict everyday life. The outline of a bed, a chair, a corner in the room where she lives. She lives in an attic room with a sewing machine; she buys second-hand clothes and alters them. Something new is opening up to her.

The Bed, 1968, is an early etching from the artist's student days. The wide bed in the floral room: a radio might be playing music, the tones of Fairport Convention, Fleetwood Mac and Bob Dylan pouring out of the speaker. An empty drawer has been pulled out of the dresser, ready to be filled with something new. On a table, somewhere outside the pictorial space, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch lies side by side with Edna O'Brien's August is a Wicked Month and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. On the wall hangs a calendar, a kind of hand pointing towards an unknown date. After a while we spot another detail: a man's head peers out from the innermost ceiling beam. It must be a gargoyle of the kind often placed under the cornices of Romanesque and Gothic churches from the Middle Ages. They were supposed to keep the evil spirits away.

IV

The corner shop

She lives in a small room with a bed and an easel. From the window, she has a view of the shop on the corner. She paints it as she sees it. She has not heard of Edward Hopper, but is advised to look at his works. She also studies the pencil drawings of David Hockney and the lines in the etchings of Jim Dine, the tools found in his works and the space between them. Later, she becomes interested in Lena Cronqvist's figures and the tools they possess.

In the years ahead, her subject matter is rich and varied: scenes from her own upbringing, introspective views and images of disasters – confessions, both documentary and metaphorical. Small and large formats, a wealth of paintings. She needs to paint over her own work, reuse the canvases, or destroy them. There is no room in the moving van, much less in the basement and attic. Who will keep and take care of her art?

The small picture of the corner store is one of those Owens has taken care of throughout it all; she can take that out of storage at will.

The Corner Shop, 1969. A place of everyday meetings, a place you visit if you live in the neighbourhood. At the local corner shop in Stockton-on-Tees she had to wait until everyone else had finished shopping before she was allowed to buy anything; she had to stand at the back of the queue no matter when she entered. It was an unwritten rule. In this shop in Sunderland, she no longer has to drag her entire childhood with her across the doorstep.

.

Second apropos: The shadow world of tools

What is a tool? The most famous answer to this question is provided by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. According to Heidegger, things are tools because they are part of a network of possibilities of use. A hammer points towards the other things that must work together: nails, planks, screws, saws and the finished structure; what is to be built and what is to be built with. Pick up an item of equipment by the handle, and a world of possible connections emerges around you.

At the same time, the tools that surround us also hold other possibilities. 'Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right,' sings Ani DiFranco. Or perhaps we should rather say that weapons – all those things that are meant to harm – are tools that are held the wrong way? Even the most useful things can always be put to other uses. All the hammers, scissors, saws, shovels, axes, knives and their constructive functions are attended by another, unpleasant shadow world in which the possibility of destruction presents itself, the potential to harm – to strike, crush, cut, stab ...

A Time for Digging, 2008Street Chant with Hyacinth, 2002

Jente med øks, 1998

V

Moving

Silent (2002)

Owens never meant to move to Norway for good. Even so, she has lived and worked in various places in Norway over the past fifty years: at Bratland in the municipality of Lurøy in Nordland, in a fishing village on the coast of Helgeland, in Mo i Rana in Nordland and in Trondheim, in Tynset in Nord-Østerdal, in Ørvik in Telemark. And at four different addresses in Brevik in Telemark. Along the way, she has undertaken travel and study trips in Britain, to Ras-al Khaimah in the United Emirates, in the United States and Beijing. In all these places she has worked, whether at her kitchen table, in makeshift workspaces or in shared studios. What does it take for a given space to become a good workplace?

.

In Survival Kit, 2008, we are looking out across an icy wasteland. An inhospitable place, one where no human will be able to survive over time. Perhaps we are witnessing some impending disaster or a scene from a nightmare. The mood is reminiscent of paintings by Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington or Giorgio de Chirico. As is so often the case with Owens, the canvas becomes a theatre, a stage where the props are carefully selected and given their appointed places: headphones that can play music (if they can be connected to anything), a radio that ensures contact with the outside world (if there is a plug), some lumps of coal to warm you (if there are matches and a fireplace to hand), a red warning light (will anyone see it?) and a hook – which can be used for good or bad.

Is it possible to paint a feeling?

Third apropos: The meeting places of emptiness

The modern art of the twentieth century imbues the still life with renewed and central significance. Not only with the Cubists' studies of guitars and bowls of fruit, but also in the form of paintings that at first glance belong to the landscape genre. A typical still life from the seventeenth-century Baroque era involves a seemingly ordinary canvas on which seemingly everyday things are lined up, becoming charged with metaphysical and moral significance: fish, fruit, flowers, insects, hourglasses and skulls point to the transience of life – memento mori. In these images, abstract concepts become tangible, the big existential and religious questions are brought close to lived life, penetrating into the smallest cracks of everyday existence. In the Symbolists and, later, the metaphysical painters and the Surrealists, the canvas itself takes on a new meaning – it spreads out and becomes an abstracted landscape in which objects and figures are arranged in silent, dissonant encounters. Think of Munch's shorelines, the deserted streets and squares of Giorgio de Chirico, the beaches and deserts of Salvador Dalì or the landscapes of Leonora Carrington and Kay Sage. In their flattened barrenness, these landscapes have become images of the modern human mind – they are psychic spaces. At the same time, they can also be read as disaster areas, impoverished 'nowheres' where the consequences of war, floods, drought and alienation become glaringly apparent.

Detached (2010) Red Boat (2010) Lost in Landscape, 2010

Den siste referent, 2010

VI

Introspective views

If you look inward, you can delve into inexhaustible resources. Scene after scene reveal themselves. It is all about digging it out. Drawing it. Reporting from foreign territories. The process can be said to be reminiscent of writing; you have to have an idea of how to approach your subject. No one said it was easy. And it is about capturing the thought, or the feeling – to get to grips with it, give it definite form. To line up the words, or forms, side by side, creating a narrative out of fragments. To let the words, or forms, engage each other in conversation, letting them tell their story as only they can.

The Writer, 2011. In a large desolate landscape stands a sea-green typewriter. The paper is in place, ready to be filled with confessions. Next to it lies a pair of binoculars; red-rimmed eyes appear in its lenses. Something has happened. Someone is in distress; a flare has been launched. Something is hiding behind the red wall.

A prosaic detail changes the character of the scene: a conch. Little by little it dawns on us that we are in fact looking at coral-red sea.

VII

The house

What does a house need? Apart from the obvious such as walls, floor and ceiling. Some windows; a house surely needs windows. The window is a boundary between you and the world outside, it protects you and isolates you at the same time. Yet it also offers openings onto the world. It puts you in touch with what is out there. The house gives you shelter, but it can also isolate you and keep you away from lived life. A house must have a door. People must be able come in; people must be able to get out.

But what does it take for a house to become a home?

The painting The Air Show, 2010, is the largest in the series depicting red brick houses. It was made when Owens had a studio at Spriten in Skien. The title alludes to an annual air show at Roker in Sunderland, featuring military aircraft from previous war operations. The planes circle ominously in the galaxy-coloured sky as once again we come across this vulnerable row of red brick houses. They do not look capable of offering either safety or warmth.

The work was destroyed a few years ago due to a lack of storage space.

VIII

The radiator

How many substitutes for human warmth can you name right now, unprompted? In a house you will be able to find several such substitutes, what Owens calls 'cold comfort': a radiator, a fireplace, a cassette player. A man we once knew told us that he used to turn on the shower in the evening; the sound of trickling hot water mitigated his sense of loneliness.

What does it take to make amends for some injury, or to mitigate a loss? Looking at the barren landscape in Winter Scene, 2010, it is obvious that these heat-generating elements provide insufficient comfort to the bird which has chosen to build its nest here.

Winter Scene, 2010

The same applies to the child in the pram seen in Lullaby II, 2009. The substitutes arranged here – the radiator, the cassette player, the heat lamp – are full of good intentions, but what they have to offer is woefully inadequate.

Lullaby II, 2009

IX
Telling it how it was

What does it mean to paint or write one's life, or to tell a story the way it happened? In Owens, we see an oscillation between the inward and outward gaze.

Observation and documentation took on a new position in Owens's art in the early 2000s. On two study trips to Beijing (2004/2005), Owens used a camera as a sketch pad, diligently documenting her surroundings. The photographic sketches were later developed into small oil paintings.

Later, the landscape became her studio; alongside photography, quick plein-art sketches served as preliminary studies for the graphic series Landmarks, 2014–15. Here, Owens documents places and buildings she perceives as important elements in the landscape: a bridge, a pond, a bird tower, a closed factory and a community centre. Here, too, the focus is on the real, the actual. In execution, the etchings border on realistic verisimilitude, yet also have a close kinship with Owens's inner landscapes: a melancholy, desolate air pervades the abandoned buildings in etchings such as House (2015) and Factory (2015).

Tower, 2015

House, 2015

Factory, 2015

We see a similar oscillation between the observation-based and the metaphorical in Owens's depictions of tombstones, a motif to which she returns over and over again. The plein-air paintings from the Brevik Churchyard, 2014, come close to reality: the luscious green vegetation, the arrayed grave markers casting shadows in the sunny landscape.

In the series From a Churchyard, 2014–15, the grave markers are rendered in an almost photorealistic style. However, small additions, inscriptions and titles add an extra layer to the images. Each marker tells its own story, but the underlying theme is clear: Memento mori, remember that you too will die. In the etching Epitaph, the inscription sounds a call to us all: 'Tell it how it was'. Tell your story and do it before it's too late. In the etching Miss you Lots (Sometimes) from the series Markers of Time (2018), the tombstone is essentially rendered in a style that comes close to reality, but Owens adds her own embellishments, extending the underlying significance of the scene. Once again, the theme of impermanence is addressed, but this time from a position of doubt: how long does a loss last, and is it permissible to say that you might not necessarily miss someone all the time?

Miss You, 2018 

In her later graphic and photographic works, Owens also uses metaphorical props. Here, too, the theme of transience is central. Inspired by the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, Owens directs attention to the interaction between hers own body and nature. In Owens, the aging female body takes centre stage.

Fourth apropos: Two views on seeingLanguage is, as we all know, full of metaphors and images – expressions where words are used figuratively. Our eyes play a particularly central role in this regard. One might say that language is dominated by eye metaphors, and that we live in a vision-centric culture.In particular, the part of language that deals with the difference between true and false or between knowledge and delusions is to a great extent governed by two different views (eye metaphors are hard to avoid!) on the matter of seeing. On the one hand, there are metaphors about the eye as a source of knowledge and truth: Scales fell from their eyes! You gain insight into something, you see things clearly or in their proper perspective, or you form ideas by seeing things before your inner eye. On the other side, you have the 'eye of deception', a set of metaphors which revolve around the fact that the sense of sight is an unreliable source of knowledge, one that can even lead us away from reality: Sight deceives! You lose sight of reality; you see things that are not there or pull the wool over someone's eyes ...

Throughout the history of art, the ways we use our eyes have changed in prominent ways. The invention of linear perspective in the fifteenth century is an obvious example. The abstract painting of the early twentieth century is another. Before, between and after these milestones, there are countless other examples of how artists have changed not only the way they (and we) see the world, but also how they and we see the act of seeing. And the various innovations and new styles, schools and isms associated with such changes have been driven by different concepts of the art of seeing: which ways of seeing lead us to truth and which to falsehood? One might say that at its heart, this is precisely what art history is about. To provide an example from the last half of the nineteenth century: should one imitate nature by observing and depicting it in a matter that stays as 'true to nature' as possible? If so, what does it mean to be true to nature? Does it mean, for example, that one should study it by setting up one's easel by a river? Or should one, as August Strindberg said, 'imitate nature in an approximate manner; in particular, the afterimage our outlook on nature creates!'

At times, the different views on seeing as a concept have caused heated debate. Who has truth and knowledge on their side? One might also say that art is very much about combining different points of view. A concrete example concerns life classes – the act of drawing after a model. Anyone who has tried to draw a human body knows that in order to translate visual impressions into a picture, you need to forget much of what you thought you knew – for example, about the angle where the femur meets the two bones in the calf. At the same time, you also have to simplify what you see and reconcile it with conventional drawing methods – which can be said to consist of accrued layers of how others have seen a knee before you.

But you could also take the matter further: suppose we were to try to summarise what all images ask us to do. A slightly odd way of putting it, perhaps, but might it not be said that images require something specific from us when we treat them as images and not as any other thing? And might we not say that what they demand is something like this: that we must not blindly trust the established, passed-down difference between different ways of seeing – the eyes of truth and falsehood. Instead, we must let things hover in peace for a little, pausing in front of the picture and what it has to show us.

Oksøya, The Little Pink Suitcase, 2017–19

Dalek Tower. No Light (2019)

Gertrude Bratt and the U14 I, 2019 Gertrude Bratt and the U14 II, 2019

X

Variations on a familiar room

First of all, you need to find a space, a room to work in. If you are to delve into these hidden resources within yourself, you must have a room in which to dig them out.

Variations on makeshift studio situations ensue: Linocuts done by the kitchen table in a fishing village. Etchings in a kitchen in Tynset. A studio in a barn in the same place, giving the artist enough space to work with larger formats. A printmaking workshop in a basement in Ørvik, where she need not be so mindful of the setting and fixtures. Etchings and woodcuts done in an abandoned kindergarten in Ras-al Khaimah; here the etching vat is placed in a sandbox where children have previously created wonderful landscapes. Then she paints in a living room in Brevik, having borrowed it from a sailor who is out to sea. Later, she has a studio in a former beer shop in the same village, and later still in the premises of a former pharmacy. Woodcuts, carborundum prints and photo etching. She has an open-air studio at Børsesjø by the Gjerpensdal valley in Skien; small, lightweight works are carried through the forest and down slopes. Then she moves to a studio community at Spriten in Skien, where she can work with large canvases. And later, a bright uninsulated room in a disused shop in Brevik becomes her studio, located in a small white wooden building which formerly belonged to the Salvation Army. 'A blessed house,' says Owens. The sounds of Lou Reed and Glasvegas pour out of the speakers. The music makes her find the space where she can work, and eventually she doesn't even hear it.

How do these rooms, these spaces affect the work itself? Some rooms make things easy, others force a change; you have to yield to them, find a method. Certain workspaces are sensitive to clutter. You have to tidy up your mess before the other people who use them get home from school or work. Other workspaces preclude large formats; it goes without saying that you cannot haul around big canvases on a kitchen counter. Still others are sensitive to cold; they force a change when the temperature drops. A white, bright uninsulated room is excellent for working in summer. But then winter comes, the prints must be packed away and the camera brought out instead. The ink used for printing becomes thick and viscous when it is cold.

It is all about finding the place where proper work can be done, where you can plumb the depths.

The Dig, 2010. In the foreground of the picture, the earth has opened up before our eyes, showing us a cross-section of what is otherwise hidden. The dark earth cradles what you are and what you have been: the handbag, the phone, the flowers and the knife. In the background, planes circle under an ominous sky. But one thing must be said: to us, those of us observing this winter landscape, it is quite clear that the spade and rake in the middle ground of the picture will fall short as tools. The rake and spade are not the ones doing the digging – the artist is, brandishing her brush and palette. She is the one who can show you the secrets of the earth.

Can a landscape be a self-portrait?

Fifth apropos: To be or not to be – homeless

What is here, clear and distinct in front of us, yet always somewhere else? One answer to that question might be: the sign. Because signs are things that refer to something else, to other places, to other things – always to something that is absent. Another answer might be: art. Because 'art' is the name given to a number of specialised ways of exploiting the duality of the sign. Think about how the lines and strokes that run together to form images point beyond themselves to things – such as a stone, a leaf or a bone. And these things in turn refer to other things – to growth and vulnerability, to impermanence, to immutability ...

Signs in general – and art in particular – are concerned with a double and often paradoxical state of being or not being – a game involving a simultaneous presence and absence. A representational painting or a novel asks for the observer's or reader's willingness to let themselves be swept along and engage emotionally with something they know to be something other than reality (what the British Romantic poet Coleridge called 'a wilful suspension of disbelief').

All this is just lines, scratches and blobs on a surface that conjure up a world of unreality, but we let ourselves be carried away by it. Why, really? Perhaps it is due to something that may also serve as a third answer to the question of what is simultaneously present and absent: a person who does not belong. This may involve a permanent state of exclusion and social death – living in a society where you have no place, not being allowed to be part of the community that surrounds you. Or it can be a more transient and less dramatic situation, such as when you arrive in a new country where you do not know the language and the cultural codes.

So many works of art spring from the experience of not belonging in some way or another. And surely that is precisely why art can offer room for the homeless – both for those who make it and those of us who get to take part in it.

Cabbage Garden, 2009

Watching, Waiting, 1980