Frith: Of Framing & Shelter

I have been slowly collecting picture frames for the past 30 years. Not with any consciousness or effort, I used to just see them in op shops or antique shops, eye-catching, all gilded and patterned with meaning and importance. Amongst them other, more plain frames from the 70’s from another era, another world. As I look at an elaborate old frame and pick it up, seeing the brown torn paper at the back, the old wire or even rope, I think of how something once lived in that frame; a faded portrait, a picture of a house, a barn, and it mattered. It mattered a great deal to someone; to someones Aunt, or Grandmother. Each frame told part of a story of affection, of migration, of a family and of a sense of place. And now in this empty frame I hold there is this absence, all this connection lost. There are carved flowers, filigree, faded gold, a crown even, around an ache, around nothing. If I could trace this frame back to its owner, to its home, and to what it once held I’m sure its story would be marvellous. I equally love Victorian gravestones and their eternal sentiment reaching across time and place to speak with such depth and sincerity, they are at once protective and yearning. Their lace ironwork surrounding beautiful long grass and worn stone of illegible writing. Beautiful filigree carved into wood, carved into stone, carved into marble. The letters leaning into their meaning, crowding to the edge in their purest form, carved by hand, by someone. How could appreciating these gorgeous gestures ever be considered morbid?

Handwriting is another keen interest of mine; determined to better my handwriting that was at the age of 16 it was then a strange hybrid of a very conservative Ulverstone Primary School cord cursive where s’s were little ducks in a row and w’s were waves in the sea etc etc this seemed to go on all day, every day. This was then met with the culturally annihilating bubble writing of the 80’s with its strange a’s and even a dot over an i was a bubbly little circle of optimism, the days of fluro, hoola hoops and butterfly clips. Where the smelly rubbers and puffy stickers transported you to a two-second land of ‘I don’t care’. Needless to say this wasn’t me (at all), merely an attempt to fit in. I cared deeply about handwriting and with the help of my local Hobart library I humbly and diligently retaught myself to write in older cord cursives from favourite Victorian poets. Now I’m proud to say my handwriting is often perceived as old-worldly or foreign, like the intelligible scrawl of a GP script, a language in itself and, to me at least, utterly legitimate. Who says it’s a Bachelor of FA? I see a picture frame and I see so much history and so many possibilities and then at once I equally love it empty on a wall, a stunning object in its own right. It says ‘something was once here, something that mattered’ and to me, that’s enough.

I moved out of home quite young, as soon as I turned 17, that week in fact. It was a time when there were lots of rentals around in Hobart, Tasmania. And I could even change houses according to my needs, sometimes I just felt like a change and it was sort of like travel. A different space, different wallpaper and different smells and light. Those fantastic unrenovated kitchens to put a small 50’s table in, a couple of free chairs, a cassette player and play The Cure, Echo & The Bunnymen. Always moving, I had moved house over a dozen times by the time I was 21, and having never been allowed to nail pictures on the wall, I would lean them. Leaning pictures, leaning frames, against one another and in different combinations on the floor with a futon, became melodic, a visual song. Different pictures, different frames isolating a part of the picture that it leaned over to become a symbol, a signifier. Her face, next to the moon, as an early Renaissance deer sits chained, the frame emphasises the moon. These spaces form such a strong part of my work now where I freely move between symbols and landscapes, sitting with them and pondering them for a long time. On a mantle these pictures eclectically chosen would reach up like signs in a rally, like band posters in a cafe entry or houses on a hill, glowing in every light, saying something more, something in another language.

Black and white photographs I’d printed in the dark room of curtains, found objects, cropped body parts placed with a Japanese print, a postcard from England, and a deep dark pencil drawing were all placed around me wherever I went, in the studio and at home. These placements still fill my home now. Our mantle in the lounge is full of half complete paintings, postcards, pictures and little sculptures. Opposite them the empty frames hang on the wall, watching and waiting. An old lead frame with oval wooden mount ashes in its coal coloured mourning. A deep wooden frame devotedly carves out flowers its leaves chipped, its glass paralysed over course gnarled wire. Polished and cleaned like a violin an elm wood frame sits against the antique white wooden wall I painted, how can I ever dare fill it? Another English oak frame of such warmth awaits any image to have and to hold - but how can this timeless frame ever be fixed to one image?

I had the great privilege of seeing a picture framer at work in Kyoto, Japan. As I went up the stairs to his workshop I was absolutely in awe; every step stacked with frames, every spot on every wall. I could barely contain my excitement. His studio was filled with unimaginable shaped frames in triangles, circles, hexagons and even some which were extravagantly hand carved. Tiny wood chips curled in the air through a ray of afternoon light. As I turned to leave he looked up from his detailed work to give me a big smile, he knew he was thoroughly appreciated. I bought many frames downstairs from his wife and it’s now very hard to put a painting to one and sell it. Even my 11 year old son says ‘but not that one mum, surely you can keep that one?’. My love of picture frames is so much more than what they do for a picture, how they contain a painting. They are an utterly humbling world of possibilities, contained and complete in their own right.