Balance | Panter and Hall
I found an old pocket balance in an antique shop. I was drawn to its pleasing shape, size and weight. I liked its rivets, the scratched and discoloured brass surface with its Victorian seriffed type. It spoke of enduring solidity and certainty.
The balance is such a small mundane object but it has a past life with a history. It may have been a treasured possession or barely noticed by its owner.
I love old objects; not necessarily antiques but well-worn, everyday things that we’d all recognise. Through their scuffs and marks of wear they link us to the person who once owned them and suggest a personality. We don’t know what they meant to their owner but that doesn’t matter. It all seems to tell a story and we can make the imaginative leap to see a possible significance.
We fill our lives with objects and always have done. They connect us and give shape and meaning to our memories.
I think at the heart of my work, I’m trying in my paintings to bring some kind of order to the tangle of recollections and emotions which crowd the inner life and which connect us all.
Structure and harmony give space for contemplation. Dents and scratches on a much polished metal surface, the careful spidery, copperplate of an old letter, the well-thumbed edges of an old book; these all give a window into other lives and worlds.
And then, I see myself and my world, upside down and distorted in the bowl of an old silver spoon.
Rachel Ross June 2020
Balance, 7 - 24 July 2020, Panter and Hall, 1 - 12 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5LU All works in the exhibition can be viewed online at www.panterandhall.com