Della Gooden and Moyra Derby

RAUMX show from 28.10.2022- until Saturday 12.11.2022 Preview Thursday 27.10 – 6pm

To be in correspondence is to be in active dialogue over time, with another person. It is most often understood within the context of writing letters, where a mutual need to maintain and nourish an exchange delivers repeated response and counter response on the page. A sense of momentum between two writers might be characterised by asymmetrical flurries of activity and quieter moments when nothing is said.

This particular correspondence began in February 2022 between us: Moyra Derby and Della Gooden. It is an ongoing exchange that will continue up to, and during, the making of an exhibition at RAUMX, London at the end of October 2022. At the time of writing the exhibition is three weeks away. This booklet presents a partial record of the last 7 months, it draws on the occasions when we met in person, zoomed, texted, and emailed.

We noticed very quickly that there is a shared porousness in our practices: an openness to spatial circumstance, to architecture, a mutual sensibility for the positioning of a viewer/participant and an understanding of the duration of experience. Consequently, we also knew that we would not be taking completed works ready to hang for the exhibition. Instead, elements would need to be open to being resolved in the space, as a physical and visual continuance of our exchange; a series of moves and counter moves, back and forth between our two practices.

Correspondence carries a sense of equivalence and comparison, and it was clear that the correlation and interaction between worked surfaces, material objects, the parts and positioning of our works mattered. They disclosed our interest in composition, in the pictorial, in painting and its histories.

Usually there are no spectators to the creative decisions we each make in our studios but In Correspondence positions us each as a spectator to the other’s process. We are trusting each other with the unknown and unresolved aspects of a practice in progress.

When it comes to the installation of the exhibition at RAUMX this is particularly the case because we will be obliged to take on board the complexities of a social and spatial dynamic as the works start to correspond directly in the space, and are changed through that exchange. There will inevitably be turn-taking, sequential adjustments and edits, and a mutual responsiveness to the material qualities or tonality of the elements we each bring. In this process we are interested in the value of shared attention, which can open out an experience, redirect it and re-tune it.

To be in correspondence with a trusted person can offer a ‘differencing’ from the life we otherwise lead. It can be a space for collusion and revelation, for a different reality. The exhibition In Correspondence at RAUMX will be the outcome of an exchange lasting over 8 months. This project presents a challenging ‘differencing’ from the practices we each have and already know.

Moyra Derby

Born in Omagh, Northern Ireland, Moyra Derby is an artist working with painting and pictorial conventions. Her two solo exhibitions in 2022: Room Plan at Studio 3 gallery in the School of Arts and Grid Narrative for Sophie Germain, in the Sibson Building, School of Mathematics, Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Kent, both mark the completion of a practice based PhD A Cut in Attention: Reimagining Attentional Capacities for Painting. Recent group exhibitions and projects include: After Bauhaus, group exhibition in response to Bauhaus Centenary, Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury, 2019; Interval [ ] slide show, Crate, Margate 2022; The Disoeuvre: Household Mix, Roseville, Ramsgate 2022; Notes on Painting II, Koppel Project Central, London 2019; Interval [ ] still: now, Tintype gallery, London 2018; Muster Station: The School of Beginnings, Tate Exchange, London 2018. Recent writing includes The Productive Inadequacy of Image for Contemporary Painting: Image Based Operations in the Work of Beth Harland, Jacqueline Humphries and R H Quaytman, in The Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts, Vol 2:1 2021; Models of Attention in the Journal of Contemporary Painting, Vol 5:1 2019; Indexing Notes on Painting, catalogue text for Notes on Painting II, London 2018.

Della Gooden

Della Gooden lives and works in London. Her work has a commitment to and a relationship with the pictorial – even though it is often dimensional, and installation based. Recent exhibitions/projects: Thinking Thresholds, with Richard Bell, THEY COME. THEY SIT. THEY GO., London, 2022; Models & Combos, a publication 2022; The Land of Sol, Sol Space, Nouic, France, curated by Ashley West, 2021; This Year’s Model, Studio 1.1, London, 2021; The Undersides of Practice, for the APT SHOTS programme, APT Gallery, London, 2020 co-curated with Catherine Ferguson; Hard Painting x2, Phoenix Art Space, Brighton, 2020 (an ACE funded exhibition co-curated with Ian Boutell, Philip Cole, Stig Evans & Patrick O’Donnell); Temporal Objects, Saturation Point, London, 2020; The Secret Life of Stuff, ARTHOUSE1, London, 2018. Writing complements studio work and essays include, amongst others: Surface-things, for Transforming Surfaces at ARTHOUSE1 Gallery, London; Theories of the World in my Head, for Eccentric Geometric, curated by Jo McGonigal & Deb Covell; A Slice of Bright Space, for Hard Painting x2 at Phoenix Art Space, Brighton. In 2005, Della founded VINEspace, an independent project space, and then Gooden Gallery, London – at this time she developed and curated alternative platforms ‘A One Night Stand With…’ and ‘24/SEVEN’.