In conversation with artist and curator Stephanie Quirk

We chat to Stephanie Quirk, one of three co-curators about Presence, a group exhibition opening on Thursday, 7 May at Clifton School of Arts. The show will feature 14 women artists, working across embroidery, sculpture, live performance, painting and ceramics. We discuss how it came about and if you need to ‘understand’ art to enjoy it. 

Amanda: How did the group of 14 artists come together? Was there a single thread you were following, or did connections emerge more intuitively?

Stephanie: This exhibition has come together through three co-curators: myself, Adriana Beukers and Kezia Simone.

Adriana and I worked together teaching — she was my teaching assistant and I was the art teacher — and we met at an emerging artist event and thought, 'Why not put a show on together?' Her flatmate, Kezia, lives with her in a beautiful house of artists, and that's how she came on board.

When we first got together we asked ourselves: what are we each working on, and what is the thread connecting our practices? That connection was the present moment. Adriana paints these beautiful interiors — evenings with her friends, her flatmates, her boyfriend — capturing light and intimacy. Kezia makes very intuitive body-mapping paintings, tracking emotion and feeling through colour and shape. And I'm looking at the internal transformative world of being a woman and a mother — shifting between the maiden and the mother, and what that means. So this sense of presence in our lives and our work: how does it become material, how does it get expressed visually?

How do you approach the word "presence" in curating the exhibition, and with respect to your own work, Becoming?

'Presence' is a broad word, and we wanted to understand how it was being evoked through each artist's practice. Whether it's the meditative, repetitious nature of sewing and embroidering, or Hayley Megan French's work — thoughts that surface as she sits at home with a new baby, writing down words — or my own work, Becoming, which is a very personal piece that actually stemmed from the loss of a baby.

Becoming is a bronze twig I found in my garden, cast in bronze, resting on a lump of concrete I found outside a clay studio where I'd been in residence making urns for the baby I'd lost. These two things — home and studio — come together in the work. And on top of that, there is a live chrysalis. Over the course of the exhibition, it may hatch.

What's extraordinary about a chrysalis is that the caterpillar actually liquefies inside the shell before it becomes a butterfly. It's completely invisible. It takes time and you can't see any of it. That idea of internally liquefying and emerging as something very different is what I'm reaching for — but also this notion of being present to meeting someone new. You have to re-meet a person every time. There's presence in that openness.

Do you think audiences need to understand the work, or is something else more important here?

People think they need to understand, and that becomes a barrier. There's an academic inaccessibility to art that can feel daunting — a fear of saying the wrong thing, getting it wrong, not understanding. And I think: stuff all that. Come and see if you enjoy something. Enjoy the material, the way it looks, the way it makes you feel. Those things are more important than understanding.

Visual art is beyond words — that's why it's visual. It's a knowingness that can't be articulated, and you can appreciate that without understanding anything. We don't really understand the feelings we have, or the world we're in, and yet we live in it. There's mystery in that, and you can just enjoy it. We're desperate to understand, to unravel, to put things in controlled boxes. But I invite people: if you don't understand, maybe there's something in that.

If someone could take away just one feeling or idea from Presence, what would you want it to be?

I am doing a performance at the opening, Saturday the 9th of May at midday, it's called Thank You, and it's based on some recent experiences I've had opening my heart through gratitude. That might sound wishy-washy and cliché, and you can roll your eyes. But what I'm trying to do in this performance is change the feeling in the room, and that's a genuinely hard thing to figure out how to do.

If I want you to come away with anything, it would be this: the feeling of your armour being taken off, your guard being let down, feeling connected — warm, loved and just at ease in the room. I'm trying to create that.

Presence runs from 7-17 May at the Clifton School of Arts, with the opening on Saturday 9th, 11am–2pm. The performance is at midday. It's a free event, and all are welcome. 

Follow @presence.exhibition for more details and the full list of 14 artists