Annunciation

Sally Underwood and Roxy Walsh
Annunciation
2009 - 2014

Annunciation is a collaboration between Sally Underwood and Roxy Walsh. Their ongoing research explores how artworks co-habit gallery spaces, and how those spaces are inhabited by the bodies within them. Dwellings, small architectures, paintings and wall paintings are central to these explorations: artworks sited within other artworks.
UnderwoodWalsh were shortlisted for the MAC International in Belfast in 2014 and invited by Hugh Mulholland to make an installation for the MAC in Belfast. The work for MAC International is a small ceramic sculpture, Monachos, together with a simple geometric painting from floor to ceiling on the gallery wall.
In Simone Martini’s Annunciation , Gabriel’s words to Mary are written upside-down, apparently so that God could read them. Monachos comes from the Greek, meaning alone, but the term now more usually refers to the monastic life. As in the Simone Martini painting where architecture (the architecture of the panel as well as the architectural imagery within the painting) provides a frame for action (radiating, announcing, revealing). We aim to produce a dynamic yet contained relationship within and between the elements of our works in the gallery.
Constructed at the Euro Keramic Work Centre in Netherlands, Monachos was made as an experiment with allowing porcelain to do what it is rarely allowed to: bulge and crack in the kiln. The individual blocks are slip cast porcelain, fired initially to make them hard enough to build with. The blocks were then constructed into the final, form, using a quickly-built shelter or bunker as the loose reference. Glaze was painted between them so that they would be fused together on the second firing. The complete structure was deliberately fired too fast and too hot so that the blocks distorted and cracked. The work's final form represents a truce between the materials - the porcelain’s urge to distort constrained by the rigid, glazed seams between the blocks.
The wall painting is more architectural than pictorial, a field of colour made up from small repetitive brush-strokes, with reference to the tradition of the directional “Light” of epiphanies, annunciations and revelations. The contradictory tendancies of materials in Monachos is further developed through a geometric and architectural use of watercolour, the most fragile and luminous of paints.