Justin Andrews
Sean Bailey, Of Self and Process
Sean Bailey: Field Effects Catalogues essay
Psychic lenses and serpentine bodies twist in entangled forests. Billowing amorphous weights cast thick palls of light as field effects abound. Industrial hulls turned into molten formations fall as fragments whilst flattened lunarscapes writhe with coral bodies along cold guiding surfaces.
Purpose is a nebulous thing – by being in zones, and through his struggle to find them, Bailey’s works reveal themselves to be more descriptively about rather than definitively of. For Bailey, the production of a painting involves a feeling out of the work’s own square area – narrative grows from this, peripheral visions form from this, titles spring from this. In each painting, Bailey goes through the dualistic process of locating himself as well as the extremities by working from inside up to them. After those zones have been moved through, what remains is a representation of self and process.
The surface of the panel is discovered through touch. Measuring marks tell the story on each one. Physical connection is most important, the primary guiding sense behind Bailey’s workflow. At every stage there is a sensory haze between background and fore. Ranging clarities show the meeting of zones, layered descriptions of something unknown, successive interventions with heavy materials giving way to distillations of one found idea after another.
To sense or engage with Bailey’s activities in these paintings is to perceptually enact the same rituals. Bailey’s marks form themselves as text from an impulsive, primal language. To see these works properly is to be affected, lulled by them, granted safe passage into them. Here, the physical surface of Bailey’s own creations gives us something to engage with. His generative grounds are not just the starting point but the body of the work, the corpus substrate from which all visual aspects hang or grow or fall. Even the artist himself is guided by them at the time of their own making.
The search behind these works has no end. They do not speak of resolved discoveries, they are findings along the way. Flattened states of amorphousness, crystallised conundrums, the workings and scratchings for something as it becomes known. The act of making gives form to the idea, the idea of making forms results in the production of the work. Paintings therefore act as carriers for evolving ideas, which in good time reveal themselves either wholly, partially, barely or not at all. Improvisation, intuition and conjuration are all reasonable understandings of these abstract transcripts.
The Field Effects go beyond concrete fact and gestural record - they contain the echo of multiplicity. Embodied within them all there is evidence of a process that is able to be applied to multiple situations simultaneously. That interchangeability allows for ideas to permeate across them all, allowing works to serve as sentinel facets of something wider whilst also being focused stories in their own right.
These works have been made by a competent musician. They use that musical and theoretical ability to initiate and develop through a process of improvisation and consolidation. Here though, for these objects that exist in their own realm, repeated gestures serve as the initial motif from which other elements extend. Heavy textures, naturalistic tones and colours of wide-ranging saturation concretise haptic beginnings, worked and re-worked by the artist into their final form.
Smeared sheets of thin movement carve spaces and silent combustions during every changing magnetic autumn, where misty veils of sweet memories against cold steel plate endlessly fall, heavily until the last nights of the earth collapse.
Many of the decisions that are made in the production of a painting cannot be recalled after that urgent phase of converting impulses into forms takes its course. A painting is a summation of effort. That effort is felt here. Whole worlds have sprung from Bailey’s hands. The paintings show us how he sees with his hands, how he discovers and opens up whole areas with them, how he comes to terms with, and mediates the will of a work with them, how he excavates sensory landscapes full of content and energy with nothing but them, rudimentary tools and many wanderings with strong will and faith.
Bailey’s practice has always been a model for how to advance then retreat, repeatedly, each time moving in to re-model and re-form. It’s that very durational, performative activity that’s at the heart of Bailey’s practice. It’s always transitory and immaterial to start with. Bailey’s paintings are the transcript, the record, the lyrical notation, the future artefact.
Forming, levelling, excavating and surfacing – these are some the actions we should associate with Bailey’s process. They’re the moves he makes to produce his perceptual passages, allowing us to traverse these crustaceous landforms, hazy impenetrable atmospheres, abysmal sheets of opaque smoothness and sunken chromatic mass, safely, almost as if he is our guide. The way Bailey has sculpted these works into existence is critical. Perhaps sight itself could be relegated to a second-order sense here, touch and triggered memory becoming primary modes of experience.
All energy is transferred. Nothing can ever come from nothing – everything is derived from something else. In these works, energy is palpable, marked out and clear to see. The object becomes the embodiment of the energy used in its making, the point of transferral from one state to another - the singularity where content crosses over between artist and viewer. Artistic intention is funnelled into fixed material form, now held in stasis, serving to redirect that initial energy outwards through widening, subjective reception and reaction.
Artists make work because they have to, as a mode of survival, of deep expression. These works have been made with that same level of urgency, enquiry, impulse and necessity. To reduce visual elements is to cast what remains – single principles are given the capabilities of many. Sparse, arid colour meets emotive mark-making, charging each work with intense levels of human presence. A timeless (and timely) quality to be carved out in a painting right now.
Not even in peripheral paintings such as these can the question of representation be avoided. But, in these works, the response to this is clear – action, decision-making, discovery based on intuition and the very figurative location-of-oneself is being represented here with a high degree of trust. Even if no solutions can be found, there’s a belief in the results that will come from that process of at least trying to find something.
Smoky ‘crete screens offer up disoriented reflections both flat and foul, sending out branches across rushing nght breezes in high level park lands. Artefacts dripping, silent films fall apart like grains along the path.
The undeniable aspect of these works is their primal nature – to make marks is to evidence one’s own existence through deliberative gestures. To come to terms with a task, or to develop a knowledge of something, or to find oneself in something subjectively requires a working through of the challenges that are encountered along the way.
There is no linearity to this, to this kind of conundrum of working at the speed of conception – Bailey shows us how he tends to work through areas, finding his way across fields, how he can fold spaces and layers, establishing connections and relationships, converting impulses into materials, mapping areas, converting, morphing and consolidating ideas as they come to meet him. It’s quite brave to confide in the fixed physical form for this kind of endless search where everything shifts and changes and leaves nothing to hide behind.
No one goes through this world without being affected by it. It’s a by-product of the interconnectedness of everything. The nature of things, and of people, change and develop as contact, connection and lived experience influences. Positioning and conditioning comes out of this - naivety, innocence, and primitivism is, if not lost, changed irrecoverably. This set of works by Bailey forms an offering – a set of examples of a language of marks that seem to state the case for a direct path back to an essential form of enquiry – into the dimensions of a plane, into the process behind the discovering and knowing of objects, into what it is to create, and into what it means to extend the impulsive, provisional, conditional, lyrical notation into something fixed, formed, found.
It's an area to be working in that’s able to be sensed but rarely fully explained. Bailey challenges the viewer with his graphic use of impulse. It’s both personal and universal. That staggering specificity in his work is disarming, engaging and transportive. I’m glad these paintings exist; time will hold onto them lightly. Phenomenal energies, forces of nature and the notion of the endless cycle are all captured and re-directed here. Bailey takes us beyond the world of the real. By offering us glimpses of his own, ours becomes all the more enriched. Bailey’s path has, I know, many steps in it yet.
Sensory overloads offer up sweet smells and sounds of singing and sunlight. From the swinging trees, white flowers hold together and set off moirés far into the vast wide planes of future residue.
– Justin Andrews, September 2022