Domestic Bliss

Abstract

“Domestic Bliss” (9 panels 45 x 45cm each, oil, gloss paint and digital print on canvas) were commissioned for the exhibition; “Terrain: Contemporary British Abstraction” which took place in St Petersburg, Russia, 4th – 26th September 2004. Ayliffe sought to continue her exploration of the innate hierarchies applied to media and process in painting and to upset or corrupt the formal language of painting through the social language of the everyday and the decorative. Within each of the 9 panels the same elements occur: the printed stitch, the repeated gestural mark and the hard-edge predetermined pattern. However, the panels are not identical and when configured the logical extension of the elements from one panel to the next is disrupted. The embroiderers’ cross-stitch is created by sewing upon a grid to create a modular form, analogous to that of the digital pixel. The grid is also, as Rosalind Krauss has observed, “emblematic of the modernist ambition within the visual arts”. The grid, then as an underlying structure of embroidery, modernist painting practice and the digitized imagery, became an important element in the work. The piece thus attempted to further democratise the ground and context in which the pixellated, gestural, decorative and repetitive elements might be allowed to butt up together in a constructive rather than oppositional relationship.