In October and November 2024, Gabriella Boyd joined the Roberts Institute of Art Residency in Scotland. Here she reflects on observation and process, weaving together her experiences from the residency with a broader exploration of how the body — both seen and unseen — shapes her practice.
1.
"Whatsoever is red in the body is hot. Whatsoever is white in the body is cold. That which is soft is moist and that which is hard is dry." 1
1 A short compendium of chirurgery containing its grounds & principles: more particularly treating of imposthumes, wounds, ulcers, fractures & dislocations: also a discourse of the generation and birth of man, very necessary to be understood by all midwives and child-bearing women: with the several methods of curing the French pox, the cure of baldness, inflammation of the eyes, and toothach, and an account of blood-letting, cup-setting, and blooding with leeches / by J.S. (John Shirley) M.D. Printed by WG, London, 1678
A researcher from the Archives and Special Collections Library at the University of Glasgow places a book onto a grey pillow in front of me. A medical journal from the 1600’s for surgeons and midwives. Advice and instruction on mottled paper weighted by white worms on each side to hold the pages down. The spine is on the brink of disintegration.
Recipes for mothers to be. All lower case 's's replaced with 'f's. Brutal descriptions of how to get babies out in the case of losing the mother or child. Wounds described as ‘livid’ and yet a strange deep calm to feel connected to the reams of women who have gone through labour.
My friend Alicia texted me while I was reading to tell me she’d just given birth in Stornaway. I was beaming when I looked back at the page the same colour as the sky. All my days in Glasgow are concertinaed.
I imagine them in the wind up in Lewis and how we used to live five minutes down the road from this library and how in 2010 she'd made a video where she's dressed in a nightie clutching a raw chicken and nursing it like it was her newborn. We'd watched videos in the kitchen for her research, women giving birth standing in streams and in doorways. We were in hysterics and in awe.
2.
At The Hunterian rows of jars of body pieces, animal and human, are held in time in perfect detail.
I’m here to look carefully at organs. The peace of observation bypassing thought. Thinking about the wholeness of form in relation to the entire tapestry of a body or story.
There's both order here, and an unravelling of sense. How did the “head of a woman” end up placed by the eye of a shark? They resist decay but not quite impermanence.
Gillian Rose writes in her memoir, Love’s Work, of her interaction with a doctor. 2
2 Love’s Work, Gillian Rose. Printed by Chatto & Windus Ltd, London, 1995
“You look just the same inside as you did when we closed you up in April.”
I’m looking at forms unseen inside. I lost my dad last August.
On my way out I ask for permission to revisit two small frames in the back room which were locked. Sad dancing baby goats keeping each other company in a jar, one above the other. They were dyed to make clear the cartilage. Red and white and gracefully hovering. I spun the jar and took photos. A heliotrope. I flicked through them on my walk home thinking about the weightless growing baby inside me.
3.
"Rampart, Bulwark, Parapet, Buttress, Outwork, Projection, Breastwork, Redoubt, Barbican." 3
3 Affinities: On Art and Fascination, Brian Dillon Printed by Fitzcaraldo editions, London, 2023
I read Brian Dillon’s Affinities on the train from Glasgow to Cortachy. He describes a particularly debilitating hallucinatory migraine, listing terms for the bristling shapes he sees — his visual impression is forcibly structural.
They remind me of a translation of all the words Proust used to describe air, “brittle, thick, frayed”. 4 Reading these in 2017 gave me the courage then to make meaty paintings depicting nothing, really — giving a flesh like quality to a palpable atmosphere with no form.
4 The Albertine Workout, Anne Carson. Printed by New Directions, US, 2014
With more distance I can see they were anxious paintings of brain fog — intensely uncomfortable to show at the time but I’m glad I let myself feel that exposed, they were actually the most honest visceral things I’d made till then. They feel to me like records of psychic and physical experience.
Writers like Garth Greenwell, Carmen Maria Machado and Gillian Rose all communicate their own first-hand experience of bodily dysfunction or struggle through a kind of memoir. They deal with real life pain alongside threads of love and desire.
Greenwell said that he hates the term "auto-fiction". He said that he uses the body as a site for consciousness. 5
5 Q&A in Foyles, London for launch of Small Rain, 17 September 2024
I still question whether to share my personal experience alongside my work but I think, when it feels possible to, it can give access to the truest feeling behind the paintings.
Marlene Dumas says "I will not open my mouth to let my teeth be counted by those who count". 6
6 Sweet Nothings: Notes and Texts, Marlene Dumas, Printed by Koenig, Amsterdam, 2015
4.
In my studio here for the next weeks I’ll hold my research peripherally, and continue to feel my way through the new paintings.
There’s a postcard on the floor. A grey head without eyes on a cerulean blue plane. Lee Lozano, Untitled, 1963. A wire enters a slot for an ear, it fuses the violent meat of a body with the mind-scape. Her face changes daily.