Tabitha Knight at The Kave Gallery

The art currently on show at The Kave is mainly a personal narrative concerning the breakdown of a relationship. Tabitha Knight echoes Sartre in showing the apparent impossibility of the individual to achieve harmonious personal relationships. The very attempt earns the title The Fool’s Journey. Knight isn’t portraying, (as Sartre did), all personal relationships as essentially power struggles, incapable of resolution, rather, her art repeats the cry of Amy Winehouse that Love is a losing game. Hot reporter, Joe Fearn, went along to the private view and discussed how art may reflect life with the artist and visitors.

I won't sleep until I devour you © Tabitha Knight

The exhibition drew a few negative comments, such as “We’ve been here before”, since Knight has obvious surrealist influences and there are also echoes of Bacon, as well as illustrators, Steadman and Scarf. But for me, this was no criticism. Picasso (among others) is often quoted as saying: ” Good artists borrow, great artists steal”! And of course, to recognise influences is not to suggest anything superficial; while Bacon’s art was, to my mind, ephemeral, reflecting foreground and background, Knight’s paintings are very solid and obvious. Knight is telling it like it is, so she does not see any good reason to be obscure. Love hurts. Following the narrative from left to right on the right hand wall, the relationship gets under way with a painting called I Won’t Sleep Until I Devour You, featuring one figure taking a huge bite out of another. As people surveyed the painting without comment, I was reminded of the poem by Ian Macmillan called “Dad, the donkey’s on fire” in which a redundant mineworker shouts, “Look at me you bastards – I’m on fire!” But all people hear is “Eee-Haw!” That’s the positive side of influences; they help to convey ideas, provided the viewer possesses the right cognitive stock.

Some of Knight’s paintings show the people in the relationship merging into each other and are somewhat ambiguous, read as either a fight or an embrace. The meaning of the injured figure playing chess is plain. The narrative ends with the two lovers/protagonists sitting side by side, decapitated. They could be saying, like characters in Eastenders, “You do my ‘ead in.” I asked Knight whether she agreed with my interpretation of her work.

Tabitha Knight: Generally my work is ambiguous to a degree that the viewer projects their own interpretations onto it and I always find that really interesting, as it varies tremendously from any thoughts I had about the work.

Joe Fearn: Its very honest about the relationship breakdown.

Tabitha Knight: Yes, it’s all pretty obvious, as I believe the first duty of an artist is to be completely honest, but I wanted it to go beyond my own experience and reach that collective universal parts of ourselves, where we all feel the same pain. I did not intend it to be a self pitying, narcissistic parody of a broken heart. What I’m trying to say is … I paint as I always do and this year my life was filled with this broken relationship – I did not intend to make a whole body of work about it…. it’s just what came out.

Joe Fearn: So is the artistic process that produced these paintings essentially an unconscious one?

Tabitha Knight: For the last few years I have been drawing every day onto postcard sized paper in pen and ink. I go back to these images and take some of them to make into paintings – so the whole process starts with the unconscious. So these images started life in a different time – most of them in a different year – but after putting them together I saw the narrative that my subconscious had chosen.

'Lady of the Hour' © Tabitha Knight

The artwork outside the main narrative is less successful. ‘Lady of the hour’ – a picture of a doe-like creature looked like a pub sign, perhaps ‘The White Hart”, seen by someone on LSD.

The ‘subjectivity’ of art has been written about ad nausea. It can be legitimately seen this way or that, but not anything goes. We may agree that we have been here before, in that Knight’s art conveys what we already know… what The Buzzcocks sang about, “ Ever fallen in love with someone…”. The bottom line, leaving out provenance, is whether one actually likes the artwork. Personally, I would love to have the painting of I Won’t Sleep Until I Devour You on my wall.

The Fool’s Journey: Paintings by Tabitha Knight runs from 15–28 September
at The Kave Gallery, 8 Kings Road, St Leonards-on-Sea  TN37 16EA

thekavegallery@gmail.co.uk
tabithaknight@hushmail.com

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