Airmail Letter: Notes on a Blue Grid Test as part of Lubaina Himid: Water has a perfect memory, Hollybush Garden, London 4 March – 14 April 2022

Abstract

Installation of 16 silkscreen prints on paper 103 x 19 cm with interwoven strip of 2 cm by 10 m digital print and music stands (variable)
Sixteen pieces of paper with an equal division of lines representing 256 beats, with irregularly placed text in shades of blue and woven through with a narrow strip of patterned paper holding it to a song. 64 bars, 4/4. four beats in a bar, approximately three minutes, the perfect length for a pop song.
[from press release Hollybush Garden]

‘Airmail Letter: Notes on a Blue Grid Test presented as part of Lubaina Himid: Water has a perfect memory exhibition at Hollybush Garden London (4 March – 14 April 2022)
‘Relating colour, memory and music, the upstairs gallery features Airmail Letter: Notes on a Blue Grid Test (2022), a sixteen-piece silkscreen print by Magda Stawarska-Beavan. The work serves as a continuation from the sound and painted installation, Blue Grid Test (2020), originally shown at WIELS, Brussels (2020) and currently on view at Tate Modern, London (2021). The Blue Grid Test was conceived as a conversation between Himid and Stawarska-Beavan to approach language, memory and pattern through aural, material and visual evocations on the spectrum of blue. Here, the transcription of phrases and tones related to the colour blue are arranged across prints structured as musical scores. Transcribing the relation between sound, colour and spoken word, the prints create a poetic structure to express the depth and complexity a colour can invoke. The sequencing of text and colour within the score creates its own visual pattern and internal rhythm, further exemplified by the work’s scale. In its entirety, Airmail Letter: Notes on a Blue Grid Test (2022) accounts for the spectrum of blue and its permeable associations, transcribing both difference and continuity.’