BREATH SILVER STONE METAMORPHOSIS
(excerpt)
by Julie Ewington

If breath is ephemeral, then stone is the conventional guarantee of permanence. (Set in stone…) For a group of works that Fielden has come to call paintings, she crushed stones into fine powder, dispersing their obdurate unity across extensive surfaces. This calculated perversity replicates traditional pigment-making: painting materials, at least until the mid-nineteenth century, were composed of natural ochres and stones ground painstakingly into dust and combined with a medium, such as oil. These stones were often precious; the finest blue, called ultramarine in Europe because it was sourced ‘beyond the seas’, was made with lapis lazuli from what is now northeastern Afghanistan.

The long history of that glorious deep blue—in European, Persian and Indian art, for example—is too complex to repeat here. Suffice to say that these blues were long prized for the ways that painters used them to summon the sky, the firmament seen as celestial, a use that Fielden honours in her title The Sky Swallowed a Stone 2025. And this is exactly what has happened here: the deep sonorous blue of what seems like the night sky, that infinite extent of the heavens, has been constructed from crushed stone. I said before that these paintings may seem like, but are not, monochromes.

This work, for instance, comprises lapis lazuli and turquoise, and sombre manganese underneath: look closely and you will see flecks of ground stone on the surface. Look even more closely and you may eventually see through the painted layers to the silverpoint drawing underneath, a ghostly presence. Other titles refer to this ghosting more directly; in the smaller Stone Dreams of Cloud 2025, with its malachite, lapis lazuli, and spinel, a glorious blue-green orb hovers somewhere in the sky of the imagination. It becomes ever clearer the longer one gazes at it. I speak of the importance of close looking since these are not pictures, but exercises in the ways this artist thinks with materials, through her body. Thinks about what one sees, about how one may see, in fact, when fine successive layers of pigment both admit and also reject light rays. About why work will be made in certain ways.

And once again, the artist’s own body is in the frame: like the flute she created, the canvas of The Sky Swallowed a Stone is the exact measure of the artist’s outstretched arms from fingertip to fingertip. This logic is continued in the size of some smaller canvases, some of which measure one arm’s length, while Fielden has employed the same bodily ratio, scaled down, for the smaller works.

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