What changes when we put something in a frame? It’s the same object, but we’ve singled it out as significant; we’ve made a dedicated place for it, set it apart.
Art frames have a dual purpose, to protect fragile edges and to ornament or complement what’s inside. But see the same painting with and without a frame, it looks altered somehow, the way a person does without makeup maybe, or having just taken off a hat. The same, but re-defined by presentation, a different way of being in the world.
And once that frame is in place, it’s not only what’s inside but also the space around it that’s asked to perform just a little differently.
Six years ago, I was lucky enough to be awarded a residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris where I met visual artist, Helen O’Leary. Helen talked to me about frames, about her art practice which was concerned at the time with a delicate negotiation between structure and space, mediated through wood and paint. I have a piece by her then on my wall right now, two rectangles of cream painted wood that lean against each other, one with nine squared spaces, one with 12, each defined by answering, thin frames.
They opened up to me a notion of what a frame is, and what happens when you smuggle it inside the painting, not as a support, but as content and meaning. I loved the fact that she put the painting outside the frame.
It set me thinking. I began to research the history of frames, the guilds, the fashions, the way they were subject (as any artefact) to crisscross with history, to belong to time and place. But the more I discovered about frames, the more I began to think about the idea of a frame. And the more I thought about how that idea might be teased and subverted and questioned, the more I began to believe that it could be used as a way of talking about subjects that were not (ostensibly) to do with frames.
The frame encloses, making a protected space inside itself. It is all about middleness, something I find myself thinking about more and more these days. What does it mean to be middle-aged, to swerve between the forward probe and the backward glance?
And how do we live, if not by making a series of frames in which we deposit our lives for safe-keeping? Work and family and play; office and home; single and married, young and old: the way we curate our sense of ourselves seems to be something to do with establishing opposing lines, and setting down our lives between them.
I thought it would be interesting to see if I could identify those lines in my own past. I found that talking about art frames gave me a way of thinking about the various, almost self-contained frames I had used to manage my life. Woman, wife, mother, poet, worker, friend: they’re different styles of frames, some ornate and fancy, some determinedly plain. I began to wonder if my life thought differently of itself according to the kind of frame I chose to put around it. This essay considers that possibility. It’s hard to think about framing without thinking about what is framed.
Our bodies are one kind of frame. As a middle-aged woman, I couldn’t write this essay without thinking about some of the ways my body defines me. My home is another. So too my clothes, my taste, my accent, my poems, the books I read and the art I return to, that I allow to mean something to me. And this essay, which becomes, of course, another frame, not gilded or imposing, but with a job, an honest job, to manage all the same.
Once I started thinking about them, there was no sidelining them. You could go small, considering how you set apart a single moment because it seems more lived and more intense than the moments to either side. And you could go large, considering how a whole life is framed by darkness. And you could look hard, if you’re a writer, to see how language tries to frame experience; how a poem sets out to frame what it glimpses; how the white page frames the poem; how the book is framed by time and space. Frames within frames: they’re how we protect and ornament our worlds.
Art frames are real objects with a fascinating history of fashion, styles and facts. From hand-carved and gilded wood to the more mechanical process of setting compo in moulds, the means of production is a fascinating story in itself. It’s the story of taste and money walking out together, with the frame sometimes being the loudest and most expensively dressed, and other times, being coy and demure, not keen to draw attention away from the painting on its arm.
Frames are facts, they cost money, sometimes more than the artwork it houses cost. Framers travelled through Europe, carrying tradition, craft and style in their kit bags. Napoleon Bonaparte declared a liking for the Empire Frame and requested the paintings of the Louvre to be re-housed, uniformly, in it. There is a whole vocabulary of styles of frame ornament. Various art movements have had opinions about frames; some have had hard and fast rules. Mondrian painted nothing but frames; Klimt and Seurat painted on the frames; the Impressionists preferred understated frames; Whistler designed his own. Degas fell out with a patron who re-housed his painting in a fancy frame.
The story of art is the story of frames. In fact, the story of frames frames art. And so it goes.
Now, when I walk into a gallery, they’re very often what I notice first. But that’s ok. I get to the art eventually and, if sometimes I find it less interesting than the frames, that strikes me as being true to life, not a bad thing for art to be.
[ Four Sides Full by Vona Groarke is published by Gallery Press, at €12.50Opens in new window ]
