Pink
Jennifer Heath
It's the gleaming "linoleum pink" I find so powerful as background in Duffield's collages and paintings. Her vast, flat backdrops emphasize her meticulously surreal (and witty) renderings of hearth and heart. There are other flat, or nearly flat, limitless surroundings in her work, almost as strong – greys, sage greens, foggy blues. But her sublime pink, for me, highlights the sovereignty Duffield wonderfully expresses with her figures floating above domestic environs. These works seem to be musings on escape, fantasies of flight, yet most of her "characters" are ultimately tied to home and the routines of the ordinary.
In a recent exhibition biography, Duffield described her art as "inspired by family, relationships, motherhood, feminism and modern consumerism/materialism." Household objects float over roofs or toward invisible ceilings. Everything is in flux, like families: dynamic, changing and simultaneously trussed and lassoed to each other by strings painted or embedded on paper or canvas. Beneath it all, solid flooring – parquet, tile, lawn. Stability.
A woman hovers (see fig. e) above a kitchen island (this time against a brick-wall backdrop), performing what swimmers call a "dead man's float" over a cluster of giraffe heads, her face donning a giraffe mask. Rabbits, turtles, dogs, dragonflies, sea creatures, balloons, bears, pigs, toys populate these terrains. Butterflies lift chairs, furniture levitates, as if wandering the cosmos, seeking a place to settle. Or maybe they're simply exiting, dissolving the clutter that defines our lives.
And children. Detached children reminiscent of, say, a 14th-century Giotto painting, where cherubs flutter over the Earth, apparently helpless to transform the tragedies below. But Duffield's children, her "cherubs," have agency. Headless, often suspended, there's nevertheless nothing helpless about them. They sprout flowers from their empty shoulders, they rise from chimneys, they transcend.
Duffield's formidable pink is ungendered. Unsentimental. Uniform. We don't normally think of pink as protective – that might be reserved for brown or black. The power of Duffield's pink lies in its complete lack of passivity and the absence of clichéd femininity.
Girl pink? Boy blue? In a 1980s study, mice living under pink lights produced 30 percent female offspring and 70 percent male. So much for market-invented pink/blue paradigms.
Whereas red has traditionally been a sign of eroticism (consider myriad paintings of Mary Magdalene, identified by her scarlet clothing), pink tempers grim lasciviousness with purity, joy and peace. It is a sign of gentility. Of good health.
Wherever we see pink in Nature, in pearls, sandstone, twilight or flowers, it awes us with the benevolent artistry of otherwise harsh higher powers.
Scientists can distinguish stars by the color of their lights. The lowest frequencies are in the red end of the spectrum, the highest in the blues. Perhaps the Beginning of Time is pink.
In her book, Pink: The Exposed Color in Contemporary Art and Culture (2000), German fine art professor Barbara Nemitz writes that pink is "unapproachable. It distances itself from everyday life."
In Kelly Duffield's exquisite work, pink is a potent, loving and necessary anchor.
ABOUT THE WRITER: Jennifer Heath is an independent scholar, art curator, award-winning activist and cultural journalist, founder-director of baksun books & arts, and the author or editor of twelve books of fiction and non-fiction.