Family of Eight by Louise Bristow
I painted Family of Eight in 2016 after being invited by Peter Suchin and Keith Bowler to take part in an exhibition they were curating at Lubomirov/Angus Hughes, London, called Fourteen Turns: Meditations on a Coffee Mill. The show presented work by fourteen artists who were asked to respond to Marcel Duchamp’s painting, Coffee Mill of 1911. Like the other exhibiting artists, I was supplied with a wooden support measuring the same size as Duchamp’s painting (33 x 12.7cm) with which to make my work.
I approached this painting using the method I have developed over the last fifteen years or so: I create a set-up of three-dimensional models and flat collage elements in my studio and paint directly from this. The process of assembling this set-up usually takes several days, and I’m never sure at the beginning what I will end up with. I start by amassing more material than I need, which I then work with, moving it around, discarding much of it, trying out different configurations and compositions. Using models I’d made earlier and bits of collage – images from books, printed packaging, coloured and patterned paper – allows me to bring together things of vastly differing scales and from varied contexts, and this process of re-contextualising is a fundamental aspect of my work. The painting I then make is a fairly ‘straightforward’ illusionistic rendition of the set-up. By painting from staged scenarios in this way I am not attempting to depict the conventional world, but to create an image of an already orchestrated, symbolic actuality.
I loosely echoed the composition of Duchamp’s Coffee Mill in my own painting. At the top I have placed a disc depicting a circle of children linking hands, which I included because its sense of movement relates to the mill’s handle shown, in Duchamp’s work, in seven stages of rotation. The number of figures holding hands in this found image taken from a children’s encyclopedia is fortuitous – Duchamp had two brothers and three sisters, who, along with his mother and father, made a family of eight. According to Duchamp scholar Ulf Linde, the artist was very aware of his place within the family, “He could only see the other members of it. He was a leftover eighth – 1/8.”
instagram: @lou_bristow
