Josephine Lyons

Limbo - Dancing With The Past  

I make paintings based on people, photo images, personal stories, and images from art history I have collected. I use these forms and personal stories together as an allegory, to describe the way I see contemporary life. A sense of limbo is key to the way I see the world and art.

‘I was among the tribe, who rest suspended [] her eyes were brighter than the star of day’ Dante – The Divine Comedy, The Vision

Certain historical paintings and the work of contemporary artists, as well as a photo of a contemporary conference for the Blind in Washington are important references for me: Ghosts of Blind man’s Bluff and Ghosts of a Blind Audience.
One of my references is the painting Blind Man’s Bluff (1868?) by Auguste Joseph Trumpheme (1836-1898). It was very important to me that the game depicted in my painting was from the past and I wanted the image to reference Victorian painting with an essence of style, and for the characters from the past to undergo a temporal shift and thus provide a different expression.

The masks and movement of shadow I create are used as an allegory to represent the passing of time. In earlier landscape works, I have painted the morning light at the bottom of a painting and the evening light at the top, to echo the passing of a day within one painting, and make the painting also present in this time frame.

In this series I reverse the natural flood of light, placing the shadows in front of the light where they might usually fall behind. For me it is another allegory - representing the past coming in front of the present. Here some of the shadows fall in front, referencing a metaphor for a uncertain time, a sense of limbo.

I find often there is blindness, in a sense of the third eye, in the way we substitute memories, images, and stories from reality if we are unable to experience the image or story ourselves. My focus here is to observe a gap in vision, and through the metaphors and choice of subject I draw near to Derrida’s idea, 'an artistic debt that cannot be repaid.'


I wish to acknowledge the following sources -
Some important sources for the works were images of the audience at a Conference of the Blind in Washington, Futurism, Blind Man's Buff painted by Auguste Joseph Trupheme (1836-1898), work of the Chapman brothers, Cindy Sherman, Glenn Brown, Marcel Proust and of Turner, Degas, and Toulouse Lautrec, and finally my models who posed for some of the pictures in London. 

The artist wishes to acknowledge as a source for this artwork the image Members_washington_seminar_crowd.jpg. This source has been used with the permission of the National Federation of the Blind (HYPERLINK "http://www.nfb.org/"www.nfb.org).