Fleur Dempsey: How Much the Present Moment Means

 Fleur Dempsey is interested in the idea of individual ‘slow-looking’ and to experience these paintings is primarily phenomenological. The title ‘How much the present moment means’ guides us to see the works as a painterly excavation of the present moment: an attempt to capture the multiplicity of sensations - colour, sound, touch, taste and smell - we experience when we take a moment to pause. It brings to mind the writerly endeavours of modernist novelist Virginia Woolf, also concerned with capturing the ‘myriad impressions’ of daily life, the ‘incessant shower of atoms’ that ‘fall and shape themselves into the life of a Monday or Tuesday.’ In prose, unlike painting, ‘myriad impressions’ cannot be viewed simultaneously; the writer and reader are restricted by the literal chronology of left to right sentence-making. The immersive ‘shower of atoms’ must be separated out into a line by line. Dempsey has the privilege of presenting simultaneous impressions at the same time, but within this, she chooses to work within an ordered line by line. Has she chosen repeated lines to gesture towards the horizontal horizons familiar in landscapes? Or, does the geometric pattern of dozens of separate stripes (as many as 72 in Consulting summer’s clock) allow us to feel quite how many subtly different sensations fall upon our bodies in one instant? Taking their titles from Emily Dickinson poems, Dempsey’s paintings point to both. Each title places us within a season, time of day or place, suggesting those intensely personal moments when our nerves can be nicked open to the world around us. Poetry is feelings condensed in language (nowhere is this more apparent than in the photographic archive of Dickinson’s handwriting cramped into the small paper oblongs of unfolded envelopes), and Dempsey similarly works with concentration. Her canvases are often small and square-ish (the smallest being 30.5cm x 35.5cm x 1.6cm) and, as such, invite us to experience them privately, individually; to lean in.

Looking produces a dizziness, the lines start to hover into each other and extend onto the walls; the closer you get, the brighter, deeper and more encompassing the colours become. Perhaps this is the work of ‘slow-looking’. Paintings created through a slowing down of time. Paintings, subtly idiosyncratic, asking the viewer to come back and look closer. Paintings which can, in our world of quickfire visual surfeit, nudge us towards looking, both on and off the canvas, more slowly. Dempsey describes herself as a multidisciplinary artist: downstairs the installation ‘Slower go’, 2023, moves the artist’s work off the canvas and into the architecture of the gallery. From afar, the installation appears as a series of delicate white discs, zig-zagged along the edges, suspended from barely visible threads. The white discs float, almost like butterfly wings. Their smallness and fragility invite us to approach with care. Up close, we learn these wing-like objects are in fact pencil sharpenings. Each is unique and cast in porcelain from the discarded sharpenings of Dempsey’s graphite pencils, which, we could easily imagine, were preserved while making the paintings upstairs. A connection to this body is made in the colouring of the threads, hand-painted in shades of gouache applied across the exhibited paintings, suggesting the installation itself could be viewed as a prelude to the canvases.