From a Sheet of Paper to the Sky

This short film, "From a Sheet of Paper to the Sky", [a link to the film is included] grew out of research that I conducted for an essay of the same title, written for the catalogue accompanying the Paul Nash exhibition at Tate Britain. In that essay, I argued against the traditional art historical tendency to review an artist's work in different media separately, and instead proposed that a consideration of Paul Nash's painting alongside his three-dimensional and textile designs, his printmaking, and photography, resulted in a fuller understanding of both the conceptual underpinnings and the recurring visual motifs in Nash's work. During the course of the research, I amassed a large number of images of his work -- from catalogues, archives, and public and private collections -- which, when sorted chronologically rather than according to material, yielded new insight into Nash's oeuvre; for instance, disproving the assumption that an artist's work in design is necessarily derivative of their painting. Instead, such analysis showed that work executed outside the sphere of “fine art” might pre-empt and direct work executed in Nash’s “primary” medium of painting. In parallel, I looked among Nash’s writings for evidence to support this reading of him as an “intermedial” artist, and found much to substantiate my hypothesis.