Portraits of homeless people on the cover of Stoddart's book 'Seamless Spaces'.
Book: Seamless Spaces
Author: Roberta Stoddart
Publisher: Port of Spain: Crapaud Foot, 2000
Jasmine NToutoume, Contributor
OVER time, the coffee table art book has come to denote a light, decorative book, feathered with glossy reproductions and "cutesyfied" text to hold even the most distracted reader's attention.
When one looks at the skill with which Roberta Stoddart's paintings reveal their expressions through text and image over some 32 pages, Seamless Spaces is not the usual fare. Many, appreciative of the talent that passes through our island, have encountered Roberta Stoddart's work in the past.
Stoddart continues to hone her perceptions and, now based in Trinidad, the Jamaican-Australian artist has recently published this book, dedicated to the homeless people of Port of Spain.
Stoddart's book is hearts spiralling into a universal theme of love, divinity, cotton buds and animal rights; the seamless space is where everything has a place in the divine order of things, eternal. As actors in a world where our beliefs are upheld by a sense of personal "doer" ship, we become attached to results, illusions that keep us tied to the belief that our lives are under our control. In our societies, those who don't act, and live unattached to results, are judged as leading insecure lives, and are relegated to the seams.
The seamless space is liberating, and in this body of work Stoddart exposes us to the Indian Hindu philosophical tradition of Advaita Vedanta that informs her work. The principles of consciousness and non-duality are central to the philosophy and "--reality is that which cannot be subrated-disvalued, denied or contradicted by another experience". Reality, as a central principle of all world religions, is God's will or God willing.
The layout of Seamless Spaces creates a balance between Stoddart's visual body of work and two sections of interviews. In the first section of interviews, parallels between the philosophical tradition of Advaita Vedanta and the issues which the artist confronts in her work are drawn: "...the line between normalcy and vagrancy is a thin one because of the inherent falseness in this community's concept of normalcy--the self begins by denying it's own worth-- we wait to be loved--."
In the second section of interviews those portrayed in Stoddart's art present the immutable self (the I and I in Rastafari speak) that is a central principle of Advaita Vedanta; and the traditional voyeuristic subject/object dualism in art is overcome; one homeless person speaks in a seamless space with the artist: "people right now will cary me dong tuh de lowest, if dey geh chance tuh talk tuh allyuh wud be so bitter--I personally doh really business, because I know I love gord, an I know I doin the right tings for gord to love me --yuh unnerstan?" In a body of work that represents Stoddart's thematic of a seamless space, these interviews are dynamic bookmarks.
A canvas, a photo album, and a document in one, Seamless Spaces is beautifully conceived. In it, the talent that passes through the artist, to her work and to the reader presents a technique that is "hyper" real in its thematic and visual texture.
The works throttle to life in thick layers of oil paint alternately applied with hog bristle brushes and soft sable brushes, and the resulting tonal gradations are supported by excellent photographic reproductions, which can usually "make or break" such a book.
The textured, white cover design presents the book as a document, in which there is no space for artifice, the seeming what is not....
Seamless Spaces is "readable" at all levels: philosophically, socially, politically and personally.
As Stoddart says: "--I simply wish to paint about my life and other people's, combined, if you will. More often than not I paint those who really fascinate me, marginalised people, courageous people...I seek to describe and make manifest in paint that which we all are, this one constant we are born with and with which we leave--" In this book the reader enters a space with the artist and leaves with themselves, having realised that the issues are timeless. --And yes there are some very pretty pictures."
Available at Hi Qo and Mutual Life Galleries.
Jasmine NToutoume is a visual artist and writer.
