Houldsworth Fine Art is very pleased to present three Painting Machines by Natasha Kidd at its Cork Street gallery. Kidd has demystified the making of a painting and all the inner workings are laid bare. The machines will be painting canvases in the gallery, turning what is traditionally a space to view finished works into a site of their production.
The machines are powered by a motor and operate on a timer. A canvas is suspended on a small rig and dipped into a vat of white emulsion paint. With each dip, a new layer of paint adheres to the surface. The layering and lines across the canvas occur as the paint in the vat decreases. The canvas begins to take on a sculptural, three-dimensional quality. Each canvas is unique and sensitive to its surroundings; each is a record of its production.
Kidd's machines inevitably raise issues about mass production painting, authorship and the diminishing relationship between an artist and the canvas. Kidd's intimacy with her work lies not only with the finished canvases but also with the machines themselves.
With the gallery as a painting factory, the viewer can smell the fresh paint and hear the cadence of production: the murmur and hum of the motors, the slap and drip as the canvas is lowered into and raised from the vat. The viewer, upon confrontation with one of Kidd's machines, will find himself in the unusual, albeit literal, position of watching paint dry.
Natasha Kidd is a visiting tutor at Chelsea College of Art and Design. She was featured in New Contemporaries 99 and will be exhibiting at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, later this year.
