Pink-mauve bruising, tender to the touch. A beady eye, watchful. Parted lips, an opening: but to where? The haptic immediacy of Rose Fulbright’s painting, Gossips strikes us before we view the diptych in its entirety. Though we recognise human and animal forms — the curve of the human mouth, the rounded body of a carp fish — we are submerged in a mystical fugue of lyrical colour and form. Aquatic blues and green intermingle with the transparency of flesh: apricot lips that quickly morph into veiny, purple passages. The double-image creates a subtle sense of disorientation: the mouth appears for a moment like an enigmatic orifice. In Fulbright’s practice, pictorial ambiguity is coupled with highly tactile material techniques. Acrylic, ink and oil sticks are employed on plush cotton velvet. Alongside rich imagery of the body, the soft texture of her work compels us to engage with it on a visceral level.

Gossips depicts a subject that is both eroticised and demonised in equal measure: the female mouth. In The Gender of Sound, classicist and poet Anne Carson traces the history of it as it relates to voice. She notes an ‘ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death’. Countless mythological, historical and popular figures have fallen from grace based on their use of voice alone. Carson invokes the example of the groan of the Gorgon, whose name derives from the Sanskrit garg, meaning ‘a gutteral, animal howl that issues as a great wind from the back of the throat through a hugely distended mouth’. Fulbright is similarly concerned with the history of women's voice, particularly as it relates to communication between women. Her title for the work pays homage to the root of the word gossip, originally ‘God sib’ (siblings in God). It was used to describe trusted friends who aided and provided support to expectant mothers. In the fifteenth and sixteenth century, mothers often had up to six Gossips. The advent of modern medicine and male presence in the birthing room led to the eventual pejorative meaning of ‘gossip’. 

Fulbright’s painting seeks to reclaim the positive meaning of the word ‘gossip’. Her work is abound with the richness of the female, generative body in a multitude of ways. One of the most central themes is that of water. All humans are more than half water, but the association with the fluidity of the female body and birth is particularly resonant. It holds strong, personal meaning for the artist, whose heritage is closely intertwined with the sea — her mother, a professor of marine biology and her grandmother having been one of the first female scuba divers. What knowledge floats from puckered lips down to the murky depths of Gossips? What secrets between women —from confidential chatter to the esoteric — have been lost? The infinite sense of possibility and discovery is mirrored in Fulbright’s use of medium. Painting on velvet is not a straightforward process. The artist paints on both sides of the fabric, beginning with an underpainting on the reverse. Paint seeps through onto the surface, resisting containment. It creates spontaneous, abstract gestures that later guide the composition: a dance between intuition and intention. 

Fulbright’s accompanying smaller works, Pocket Pieces, are more focused meditations on gesture. Off-cuts from the larger paintings, here details become works in their own right: the semblance of shape, the subtleties in pooling and staining of colour. Though intimate in scale, they expand our field of vision and our experience of painting itself. Drawing upon the work of Merleau-Ponty, Fulbright’s attitude to painting corresponds to the idea of embodied perception: ‘Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world’. Indeed the artist’s paintings celebrate the body as it moves through the world and the pre-intellectual knowledge it holds. And for Fulbright, the ‘fabric’ in which it is caught caresses us, it is all-enveloping, abundant. In the artist’s words: too much.

References

Anne Carson, ‘The Gender of Sound’ in Glass, Irony and God, (New York: New Directions) p.119-137.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, in The Essential Writings of Merleau Ponty, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969) p.256