Book Launch: MADE ON THE TABLE – Rhona Warwick Paterson & Tessa Lynch
Gallery 4
21 May 2022

A podcast of this launch is available on Glasgow Museums PODCAST series for GOMA at 25.

Made in collaboration with Tessa Lynch, MADE ON THE TABLE includes collagraph prints, prose and documentation of work made collaboratively with others as part of her ongoing installation in the exhibition Domestic Bliss – a working artist studio table in the exhibition exploring the blurred boundaries of home, work and studio spaces, particularly for women artists.

In September 2019 Rhona Warwick Paterson began her Associate Artist tenure at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA). The role of the Associate Artist is to provide a challenge to the building and to use the opportunity to research areas of ‘mutual curiosity’ on agreed themes with the curatorial team. In this case the artist was excited about responding to the exhibition Domestic Bliss and GoMA’s history as a home and Royal Exchange.

We were equally excited about the potential of this response and her initial proposal to install a working artist studio table in the exhibition to explore the blurred boundaries of home, work and studio spaces, particularly for women artists. This began to unfold as she took residence each Friday at her table working in a public space for what is often the private act of a studio practice. She met with artists, writers and curators to experiment in making work and this work would be interrupted by staff or gallery visitors asking her what she was doing. Her works began to inhabit the exhibition and the works in the exhibition began to influence her thinking.

Then in March 2020 we went into lockdown and that reality of blurred boundaries of practice, life, making and care became a reality for all of us. Those practicalities of home working with home schooling, being isolated within our homes for caring duties disrupting our approaches to collaboration and the labour, the repetitive labour involved in cleaning shared kitchen tables of work, schoolwork and meals shared together. The context of Domestic Bliss for this tenure became more acute and how it was playing out across a pandemic.

MADE ON THE TABLE

This artist book marked a significant point in Rhona Warwick Paterson’s consideration of public and private space. What it means for an artist to occupy civic space and work in the sight of a visiting public. In a continuation of the collaboration with Tessa Lynch and the Exquisite Corpse methods used in her table work, the artists made NIKI/Niki builds a body – a filmed performance in response to the works of Niki de Saint Phalle and Nicola L in Domestic Bliss. Recently premiered at NADA, New York, this film will be screened at the launch alongside other works made during Rhona Warwick Paterson’s tenure as Associate Artist.

MADE ON THE TABLE was commissioned from Rhona Warwick Paterson by Glasgow Museums with support from a Glasgow City Heritage Trust Sharing Heritage grant and designed by Maeve Redmond.