Avis Newman’s work is rooted in the conceptual space of drawing and incorporates canvas works, objects and works on paper. Central to her practice are longstanding influences from the symbolic worlds of early cultures. Fundamental ideas of ‘origin’, as embodied in genesis of the mark and the initial moment of tracing are given expression as an amalgam of signs, inscriptions and encoded images. This brings to mind for the viewer, different modalities of being that are analogous to the deep structures of the mind.
Concepts of boundary and edge, and framing the limits of the unframed continue to be a preoccupation for Newman. Since 2007, she has identified her works as Configurations - ‘assemblages of interchangeable elements, layered, hung, and partially overlapped, which are arranged in sets or in sequences and that resist an absolute fixity.’1 These works propose a series of mobile relations that exceed fixed boundaries and become provisional in nature. Here, images do not suggest a correspondence to things in the world, but are things in themselves.
Curating and editing formed part of Newman’s extended practice from 2000 to 2010 and coincided with a period in which she developed her work and ideas by a different route. The notion of drawing as a phenomenological exemplar of the ‘operations of thought’ and how that can be articulated within a broader practice was been a longstanding preoccupation, and during that time uppermost in her thoughts.
In 2003, Newman selected the exhibition of drawing works from the Tate Collection for The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act, curated by Catherine de Zegher for The Drawing Center, New York, USA and Tate Britain. Selecting these works enabled Newman to explore a different theory of drawing - connected to unconscious processes, language and the genesis of marking and writing. This period of work for Newman, allied with her professorship of Drawing at UAL, has been an ongoing evolution of her thinking. The outcome of those thoughts and perceptions are embedded in subsequent work.
Newman’s most recent work brings together layered references where meaning is not absolute, existing only as interpretation. These multiple works suggest together with a sense of “silent colour”, schematic spaces redolent of encoded forms and diagrammatic structures - where multiple works stand as psychic texts and ‘vision functions as an operation of thought’, (Maurice Merleau-Ponty).
Both philosophical and literary, Newman continues to allude to the condition of an uncertain subject in the present world and in so doing continues to question the closed frame of painting.
1 Online Drawing: Through The Twentieth Century, Text by Catherine de Zegher (pg 108-109). Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010