Margaret
Priest was raised in the working class district of Dagenham,
situated by the docklands of East London.
Although its history can be traced back to a medieval village,
Dagenham's real story unfolds as a modern suburb.
In the 1920s, the London County Council undertook a major housing
development project and the local economy began to reflect the modern
world -
the automobile industry, battery and pharmaceuticals manufacturers.
Growing up, Priest recalls her impression of “provincial
modern” in a pocket of postwar prefab blocks with metal mullion
windows:
it was a sign that modernism could repair the ravages of war.
Priest studied at the Royal College of Art, London, in the late
1960s, part of a generation of English artists who were exploring the
links between popular culture and the visual arts.
Her work reflects an ongoing interest in public and domestic
modernist architecture, and can be characterized by an attention to
detail and the craft (the design), but adding a commentary on the
modernist (utopic) vision, the signs of optimism.
The work represented in this exhibition deals with the materials
and processes of a constructed world, and the creation of improbable,
but functional objects.
The
suite of 27 prints (1994), based on Priest's collaborative public art
commission The Monument to Construction Workers
(Bay/Adelaide Park, Toronto, completed in 1993) is a graphic lexicon of
building processes – rough carpentry, poured concrete, plumbing,
tiling, etc.
Rather than depicting the constructed world and built
environment, the etchings represent the fingerprints and the structural
skeleton of built space.
In contrast, the Building Materials works (1990-5) are
meticulously rendered drawings of the surface topology of natural
materials – granite, marble and wood – and man-made substitutes,
terrazzo and cultured marble.
They are framed in the respective materials, a union of the
pictorial representation and the “real thing”.
In a recent (2000) work, Priest transcribes a small drawing of
“lean mix concrete” – an intermediary construction technique
(usually hidden by a surface coat) – into wall-sized vinyl sheet by a
repeat pattern method, similar to wallpaper design.
Instead of completing the illusion of “wall”, the work is
hung loosely, as if a shower curtain, a decorative ‘conclusion’.
Many of these ideas and concerns flow into the two armchair
objects (1996 - 2000).
They are surrogates and interlopers in the world of utilitarian
objects, with the addition of a wry commentary on the role of the art
critics as the arbitrators of style and taste.
Priest states:
