1980 : 1981 :1982 : 1983 : 1984 : 1985 : 1986 : 1987 : 1988 : 1989

Perfect Moments

In 1982 [Marty St James and Anne Wilson] formed a partnership with their first performance 'Perfect Moments' based on a passage in a Mills & Boon romance. The toured this work in Britain, Holland and the USA [...]. The basis of all their work was romantic pulp-fiction as they explored the differences between ideal and actual relationships. As well as using video in their performances they also made video art tapes [...] Many of their performances are also accompanied by exhibitions of Wilson's paintings and prints.
(http://archive.tate.org.uk)

This exhibition shows fifteen paintings, all of which have evolved from the ideas and inventions of the PERFECT MOMENTS performance. While live art has served as the catalyst for these works, which can be seen, on one level, as ‘verbalisations’ on the route to making performance, they exist independently, and are equally important. The ability to enjoy them does not depend on the performance piece having first been seen.

This is because both the paintings and the live work share the same concerns expressed in different ways. The working process involved in the paintings draws on ideas and notations from a particular performance piece, but also embraces a much larger, more general collection of ideas.

The fifteen paintings are large works on paper, predominantly in black and white, with small highlighted areas of colour. The works contain a combination of imagery evolving from three sources: the original working notations for PERFECT MOMENTS, imagery initiated from the Mills and Boon novels, in terms of the artists’ own experience and, perhaps most importantly, imagery which has developed from the very process of painting itself. These three sources form the base for the works, all of which are produced by both artists.

They usually begin two paintings simultaneously, one on each wall. The basic composition is laid down by making marks on the paper in pencil from the performance notations and working back into these initial marks with indian inks, applied in a combination of ways using Japanese brushes, ordinary brushes, goose quills and calligraphic and mapping nibs. The small areas of colour are worked in using chalk pastels. [...]

Each painting uses a compilation of different performance notations, most of which are fragmented and small in scale. These, when reworked, become much larger, and create a powerful, direct, physical impact on the spectator, which could never be achieved by the original scale of the markings. [...]

(Chrissie Iles August 1982 in in Marty St. James, Anne Wilson, Perfect Moments, text by Chrissie Iles, translation by Sian Edwards, Catalogue of an exhibition, Cardiff: Oriel, 1982, without page number)