From the mid-1980s onwards, painter and printmaker Tess Jaray has taken her complex, rigorously executed abstract art out of the gallery and onto the floors and pavements of public spaces. She designed the paving at London's Victoria Station (1985), Birmingham's Centenary Square {1988} and Wakefield's Cathedral precinct (1991). Her interventions into the urban environment, re-shaping it in line with her own aesthetic project (she pays scrupulous attention to details such as the width of sand between each brick) are a satisfying conclusion to a century which began with women invading city spaces, demonstrating to claim political rights.
Jaray trained at St Martin's School of Art and at the Slade during the 1950s. Her pristine geometric abstract paintings are contextualized by the explosion of such art in the early 1960s (she had her first solo exhibition at the Grabowski Gallery in 1963, in the same venue and year as Pauline Boty's exhibiting debut). They developed out of Jaray's interest both in architecture and Islamic art. In the catalogue for her 1988 Serpentine Gallery exhibition, critic Richard Cork noted a fascinating link between Jaray's Islamic-influenced concourse at Victoria and the fact that the Orient Express still departs from that station. Jaray has identified a spiritual dimension in her work, and has said that her patterns 'echo' the mysteries of life. This links her to modernist abstract painting, such as the work of Mondrian, and also to its literature, including the poetry of T.S. Eliot, which Jaray has drawn on for the titles of some of her work.
Although it may seem a big step from two dimensions to the vast stretches of the public works, uniting all of Jaray's art, whether manifested in delicate, muted paint, or brick and stone, is her desire to evoke the rhythms of life through the vitality of her patterns. And some of her work makes obvious reference to natural forms. Her sixteen curve paintings of the early 1980s are like distant reverberations of the remembered forms of cobwebs, leaves, fossils and shells. |
