101. TIRZAH GARWOOD: A SPACE BETWEEN MOMENT AND MOVEMENT.

Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious, Dulwich Picture Gallery - LONDON.

Tirzah Garwood, Horses and Trains, 1944, oil on canvas.

M-A: In the toppled toys, redwood-sized poppies and intrepid cats - which sculk kingdoms of adventure - a space between reality needing fantasy. Garwood's collection testifies to remind, that despite it all, we need to utilise our dream worlds, if we stand a chance to live and not just survive.

The work of Tirzah Garwood lingers long after being seen for the first time.

The artist's playful use of mixed media creates an undulation of rhythms which collectively sustain a pensive atmosphere -  a language which becomes clearer and louder throughout Garwood’s lifetime. From tentative engravings depicting the micro worlds of domesticated free-moving dolls, scratched in girlhood to a final painting of a self, seen as a statue within a surrealist starlit landscape.

The many rows of paintings, woodcuts, models, embroideries and marbled papers which cover the walls of Dulwich Picture Gallery have an overwhelming sense of attempt. Not in the sense that the works presented do not testify to resolution. There are extraordinary examples of a defined style of various media which are condensed and significant for pushing against the context of the times within which they were made. 

A retrospective of pieces are presented more as thoughts than historical decorative works. The traditions of the prettified passive gentlewoman are actively dismantled in a scintillating series of disruptive dedications to self. Any pre-conceived suggestion that the artist should be seen as just the partner to a famous man are thoroughly broken down, resulting in a presentation which burns with foresight for listening to an internal voice which is quietly questioning and earnest in intention.

Scenes are often viewed as impossible to an adult eye whose vision is weighted by a reality grounded in fear - for Garwood, whose view point seems more that of a child than a grown up - is framed within fantasies of talismen and portals, conjuring calm in the play of discovery. In the toppled toys, redwood-sized poppies and intrepid cats which sculk kingdoms of adventure - a space between reality needing fantasy. Garwood's collection testifies to remind, that despite it all, we need to utilise our dream worlds, if we stand a chance to live and not just survive.

Engraved depictions of domesticity scaled to the size of a doll's house window, invite an audience to peer in, akin to the lace-trimmed windows of the picturesque streets of Dulwich, where this exhibition is located. Their dimly lit interiors full of mystery, amidst the impression of the blissful only to impress the stress of high-maintenance. A cast of characters sleep and stretch, swim and sit - deep in thought - Tirza's eye examines these atmospheres with the focus of an insect - waiting - studying - contemplating the nothingness of life’s motions as both monotomy and monumental.

It is within the marbled papers that Garwood seems most free - as the slackened gaze of ripples repeat a water's surface - to reflect a reality into abstraction and to be hypnotized by such seductive, natural rhythms.  Evoking the sensation of sinking fingers into such fluidity from a boat’s edge or to view a landscape as a zoetrope tillage of ploughed fields from a train window. Garwoods' marbled patterns pigment a surface's edge - a skin of another world beneath, are we looking in or staring up? 

Tirzah Garwood, marbled papers, 1934 - 41.

An impression relative to the Florentine and Turkish tradition of decorative papers -  and yet a percussion of notes appears in front of our eyes - as alternative sheet music for instruments understood by the folkloric and mythical. Chance marks undulate and dance, created by Tirzas's curious, playful summons - allowing for patterns which at first appear to be akin to the end papers of antique books and yet they seem to spring to life before our eyes. The jarring yet hypnotic colour combination of loosely swirled inks akin to the warp and weft floats in a woven cloth - nubbly with fibrous -  raw and raucous as streams of thoughts somehow coexist as a chorus of the subconscious - inter woven as ancestral tartans. For the Garwood checks are presented in a palette of feather plumbed soil shades, in the blushes of emotions in the greys of memories remind of Rorschach ink blots.

The side effect,  possibly to not being acknowledged within her lifetime as her famed husband Eric Ravilious, allowed Garwood time and space to develop quietly as a voice which does not mimic but muster progress from the often salvaged materials and symbolism of a life lived amongst children. A vocabulary of references repeat as a language develops, from the childhood playthings denoting age, to a natural landscape reframed - to re-evaluate - enabling the viewer to perform the role of fantasy narrator within the miniature stage sets presented. All this comedy masks a tangible sense of tragedy - Garwood's menagerie of depicted placid animals - all of whom just miss the eyeline of the viewer, seem silenced - a secret shared with the artist.

Works created out of the private necessity to communicate allow for an extraordinary sense of self-possession within the exhibited materials. There are occasions where works become more than their media - and it is within these that Tirzah Gardwood’s voice can be heard.

Tirzah Garwood, Erksine Returning at Dawn, 1950, oil on canvas.

Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious, Dulwich Picture Gallery - LONDON. Until 26 May, 2025.

Special Thanks: Eibhlin Kissack.