Susan Hiller’s quasi-scientific cataloguing of her own past through the relics of old paintings has a kind of connection to the recent work of Jeff McMillan. He describes his studio as “a kind of laboratory; a place where process painting meets the natural processes of time and entropy”. The transformation so unambiguously conveyed by Hiller’s act of incineration, finds a more mellow counterpart in McMillan’s marshalling of time and the weather on the paintings which hang on the exterior walls of his studio in a small London yard that he describes as: “having evolved into a sort of environmental installation for painting”.
It is a process of aging and curing, of seasoning, rather than deterioration; a balance of waiting and watching as frames stretched with old linen dipped in thinned oil paint are gradually altered by the weather over a period of 1-2 years. As Jeff puts it, “…sun, rain, mildew just become another part of the process. I bring them in when they intuitively feel right. Then I take them off the frames and iron and flatten them. Eventually they are like a new raw material to work with in the studio - some are framed behind glass, some I fold and dip again, or some, like this example, are folded and become sculptural”.