PALIMPSEST, OR, THE PRESENCE OF BEFORE
CATALOG ESSAY FOR LAKSHMI MUIRHEAD’S SOLO EXHIBITION, THERE IS ALWAYS A BEFORE, AT J. RINEHART GALLERY, SEATTLE, SEPTEMBER 2020
“There is always a before.”
The statement hangs in the air, a notion so tempting to resist that it’s hard to accept. But in further reflection on the components of material existence, down to the molecular level, I find I believe this point to be inarguable. There is no true tabula rasa, no blank slate absent of memory. Everything we are comes from clouds of dust in the universe. Everything we know comes from the work of all who came before. The world's metropolises sit atop the former cities upon which they are built; each era creating its own version in time. People build language, culture, and arts over millennia; creating a conduit of intergenerational wisdom from the past into the future. And each of us is a composite of those who came before us. The lived experience of our ancestors are encoded in our DNA, determining our survival, and our resilience. There is always a before.
The speaker of this salient fact is artist and painter Lakshmi Muirhead. We’re sitting together in her airy studio, filled with Seattle’s distinctly golden summer light. A wall of inspiration filled with poems, postcards, reminders, and small works by the artist fill a bulletin board by a bookshelf. Notes are scribbled in pencil across loose paper on a sturdy, utilitarian work table made of unfinished wood. Throughout the space, monumental works lean gently against the wall; silent, but no less present as members of this gathering.
Quiet as they are, they speak volumes about construction, sculpture, physicality, and weight. I think back to the words of a former teacher who once told me, “sometimes the quietest thing in the room is the most powerful”, and the magnitude of his words ring with a potent truth. Lakshmi’s paintings appear deceptively minimal, but their multitudes confront us with undeniable complexity. They announce themselves differently than something bright, colorful, or didactic. They carry their gravity as profoundly as an oceanside cliff or a mountain, an exposed petrified riverbed, or ancient architecture. While describing their making, Lakshmi impresses the importance of materials and layering; of histories and futures; of buckling and crumbling. There is so much exposure within the fracture; a palimpsest.
A palimpsest is a reused manuscript upon which the previous text may be only partially removed or legible, scraped off or erased, but in some way persisting through the new script. To refer to an object as a palimpsest is to speak to its hidden tiers of information; to imply secrets. A palimpsest speaks to the indelible nature of its history and the persistence of revision. A palimpsest is a repetition of cycles and new beginnings. A palimpsest is always built upon the bones of what came before.
The statement hangs in the air, a notion so tempting to resist that it’s hard to accept. But in further reflection on the components of material existence, down to the molecular level, I find I believe this point to be inarguable. There is no true tabula rasa, no blank slate absent of memory. Everything we are comes from clouds of dust in the universe. Everything we know comes from the work of all who came before. The world's metropolises sit atop the former cities upon which they are built; each era creating its own version in time. People build language, culture, and arts over millennia; creating a conduit of intergenerational wisdom from the past into the future. And each of us is a composite of those who came before us. The lived experience of our ancestors are encoded in our DNA, determining our survival, and our resilience. There is always a before.
The speaker of this salient fact is artist and painter Lakshmi Muirhead. We’re sitting together in her airy studio, filled with Seattle’s distinctly golden summer light. A wall of inspiration filled with poems, postcards, reminders, and small works by the artist fill a bulletin board by a bookshelf. Notes are scribbled in pencil across loose paper on a sturdy, utilitarian work table made of unfinished wood. Throughout the space, monumental works lean gently against the wall; silent, but no less present as members of this gathering.
Quiet as they are, they speak volumes about construction, sculpture, physicality, and weight. I think back to the words of a former teacher who once told me, “sometimes the quietest thing in the room is the most powerful”, and the magnitude of his words ring with a potent truth. Lakshmi’s paintings appear deceptively minimal, but their multitudes confront us with undeniable complexity. They announce themselves differently than something bright, colorful, or didactic. They carry their gravity as profoundly as an oceanside cliff or a mountain, an exposed petrified riverbed, or ancient architecture. While describing their making, Lakshmi impresses the importance of materials and layering; of histories and futures; of buckling and crumbling. There is so much exposure within the fracture; a palimpsest.
A palimpsest is a reused manuscript upon which the previous text may be only partially removed or legible, scraped off or erased, but in some way persisting through the new script. To refer to an object as a palimpsest is to speak to its hidden tiers of information; to imply secrets. A palimpsest speaks to the indelible nature of its history and the persistence of revision. A palimpsest is a repetition of cycles and new beginnings. A palimpsest is always built upon the bones of what came before.
Lakshmi Muirhead, There is Always a Before, 2020 acrylic, oil, graphite, and plaster on canvas 60 x 60 x 2 inches, image courtesy of J. Rinehart Gallery and the artist
A society is a cultural palimpsest
Cultures perpetually create new narratives, adding to all their previous stories; echoes of the old peeking through; never gone, never truly erased; brought forward into our contemporary and collective memory. At its best, to remember is to strive towards ending cycles of harm, creating new cycles of generative growth. Culture builds upon itself.
A city is an architectural palimpsest
As a metropolis ages, each iteration forms over the last, like slices of time along a continuum. When we move through these versions of our city, we sometimes see the former in the midst of a transition towards the next. The city of one person, or peoples, comes together as a shared thoughtform or entity. Each new generation imagines its city to exist beyond the scope of its past, reaching towards the future.
A person is an ancestral palimpsest
We are built from all the stories ever told beneath the visible story we are currently telling. An intergenerational history leaves instructions, and wisdom, for our future. Epigenetics is often framed as an explanation for the way trauma works in the body. But what also lies beneath the surface of trauma is resilience, transformation, endurance, and triumph. The proof of this is that we are here.
A streak of red
Upon the mottled surface of a series in white appears a bold, purplish red streak. This streak recalls a deep gash, a wound, speaking to the impact of history or the effect of the present; or the circumstance of simply being as in, a being who gives or cares for life, who bleeds; a thread connecting ancestry and perhaps, a resistance. A denial of blood. A denial of motherhood. A rejection. Or is it? A poem by Sylvia Plath on the studio wall states, “it’ll just get lodged”, and we are led to contemplate what motherhood means or implies and how motherhood is the center of a community. This streak of red symbolizes all the lives, lived and died, like a book of life. A span of time.
Across a field of white, interrupted by lines
Muirhead frequently writes across the surface of her work in a wordless text known as an asemic semantic; an invented linguistic form outside any known language. This seemingly nonsensical script emerges and submerges itself through the layers, across the painting like a page, falling into a rhythm of markmaking, of cursive (a forgotten ledger, nostalgia); of degrees of readability and illegible handwriting or unspecific sentences of nonsayings in particular. Cursive without prescript serves as a soothing repetitive motion for the writer, a meditation; compulsive, ritualistic, and deeply satisfying.
Writing is how we both process and legitimize our thoughts, feelings, and experiences; to contribute them towards a canon; to impart, assert, or impose an experience into history. To share them and validate them to ourselves and others. To reach across a divide and bring together. To write then, is to sew. Mend. Fortify. Build and rebuild anew over the top of the old. To release. And then, perhaps, a release of thought or attachment as an exercise in acceptance.
Cultures perpetually create new narratives, adding to all their previous stories; echoes of the old peeking through; never gone, never truly erased; brought forward into our contemporary and collective memory. At its best, to remember is to strive towards ending cycles of harm, creating new cycles of generative growth. Culture builds upon itself.
A city is an architectural palimpsest
As a metropolis ages, each iteration forms over the last, like slices of time along a continuum. When we move through these versions of our city, we sometimes see the former in the midst of a transition towards the next. The city of one person, or peoples, comes together as a shared thoughtform or entity. Each new generation imagines its city to exist beyond the scope of its past, reaching towards the future.
A person is an ancestral palimpsest
We are built from all the stories ever told beneath the visible story we are currently telling. An intergenerational history leaves instructions, and wisdom, for our future. Epigenetics is often framed as an explanation for the way trauma works in the body. But what also lies beneath the surface of trauma is resilience, transformation, endurance, and triumph. The proof of this is that we are here.
A streak of red
Upon the mottled surface of a series in white appears a bold, purplish red streak. This streak recalls a deep gash, a wound, speaking to the impact of history or the effect of the present; or the circumstance of simply being as in, a being who gives or cares for life, who bleeds; a thread connecting ancestry and perhaps, a resistance. A denial of blood. A denial of motherhood. A rejection. Or is it? A poem by Sylvia Plath on the studio wall states, “it’ll just get lodged”, and we are led to contemplate what motherhood means or implies and how motherhood is the center of a community. This streak of red symbolizes all the lives, lived and died, like a book of life. A span of time.
Across a field of white, interrupted by lines
Muirhead frequently writes across the surface of her work in a wordless text known as an asemic semantic; an invented linguistic form outside any known language. This seemingly nonsensical script emerges and submerges itself through the layers, across the painting like a page, falling into a rhythm of markmaking, of cursive (a forgotten ledger, nostalgia); of degrees of readability and illegible handwriting or unspecific sentences of nonsayings in particular. Cursive without prescript serves as a soothing repetitive motion for the writer, a meditation; compulsive, ritualistic, and deeply satisfying.
Writing is how we both process and legitimize our thoughts, feelings, and experiences; to contribute them towards a canon; to impart, assert, or impose an experience into history. To share them and validate them to ourselves and others. To reach across a divide and bring together. To write then, is to sew. Mend. Fortify. Build and rebuild anew over the top of the old. To release. And then, perhaps, a release of thought or attachment as an exercise in acceptance.
Lakshmi Muirhead, Dynasty Two, 2020 acrylic, oil, graphite, and plaster on canvas 84 x 56 inches, image courtesy of J. Rinehart Gallery and the artist
And finally then, a dark plane
Broad slabs of stratified dark material appear like slate or shale, or weathered petrified wood and bone; creating a deeply meaningful place of rest, catharsis, and repose; a ground. Literal.
The surface of these paintings hold space for such rest, but also bear the scars of restlessness; of layering, unlayering, scraping, and chipping away to reveal what bled through, what persisted. What we believe we would prefer—a beautiful unmarked and pristine surface—is rarely what we get. Perhaps we receive moments of reprieve in the plaster; a smooth polished place here, bright white, sparkling. And then. And then. A mark, a scrape, a stain. How does the presence of the scar create this beauty? The varying terrain is the point and without it, the surface is merely a blank page.
Lakshmi talks about working through trauma, working through questions without answers, working through the uncertainty of a pandemic, working through the increased visibility of social, political, and environmental injustice, working through the beginnings of an uprising. Working. A million tiny cuts, of perpetuated wounding, of accumulation of wounds, and back to the red streak now. The bruising and the awakening of anyone who isn’t safe in their daily lives. And now back to the slate. A composite formed over a millenia of intense pressure that persists and resurfaces over time. All of this is deeply embedded in the work alongside the forces that create them.
Lakshmi Muirhead creates paintings that are explicitly about the process of living; both building and interrogating the existence of things; of burying what is no longer needed or what no longer serves its purpose. She then creates the opportunity to add and perhaps reveal a great many more things that are constructive, supportive, hopeful, and restorative. Aesthetics are circumstantial to this process, an outcome that cannot be anticipated. The perception of something as visible—or invisible—should not imply there is an absence of substrate or subtext. The before is not just a suggestion. It is an undeniable truth; right there for us to see.
Broad slabs of stratified dark material appear like slate or shale, or weathered petrified wood and bone; creating a deeply meaningful place of rest, catharsis, and repose; a ground. Literal.
The surface of these paintings hold space for such rest, but also bear the scars of restlessness; of layering, unlayering, scraping, and chipping away to reveal what bled through, what persisted. What we believe we would prefer—a beautiful unmarked and pristine surface—is rarely what we get. Perhaps we receive moments of reprieve in the plaster; a smooth polished place here, bright white, sparkling. And then. And then. A mark, a scrape, a stain. How does the presence of the scar create this beauty? The varying terrain is the point and without it, the surface is merely a blank page.
Lakshmi talks about working through trauma, working through questions without answers, working through the uncertainty of a pandemic, working through the increased visibility of social, political, and environmental injustice, working through the beginnings of an uprising. Working. A million tiny cuts, of perpetuated wounding, of accumulation of wounds, and back to the red streak now. The bruising and the awakening of anyone who isn’t safe in their daily lives. And now back to the slate. A composite formed over a millenia of intense pressure that persists and resurfaces over time. All of this is deeply embedded in the work alongside the forces that create them.
Lakshmi Muirhead creates paintings that are explicitly about the process of living; both building and interrogating the existence of things; of burying what is no longer needed or what no longer serves its purpose. She then creates the opportunity to add and perhaps reveal a great many more things that are constructive, supportive, hopeful, and restorative. Aesthetics are circumstantial to this process, an outcome that cannot be anticipated. The perception of something as visible—or invisible—should not imply there is an absence of substrate or subtext. The before is not just a suggestion. It is an undeniable truth; right there for us to see.
Lakshmi Muirhead, To Ashes, 2020 acrylic, graphite, conte, and plaster on canvas 60 x 60 inches, image courtesy of J. Rinehart Gallery and the artist
This essay was originally printed in a beautiful hardbound coffee table book published by J. Rinehart Gallery in Seattle, Washington. This publication features full-page full color images of the artwork in Lakshmi Muirhead's solo exhibition, There Is Always A Before, for which this essay was written. You can purchase your copy here!