The Quest for Irma

Old Steine Gardens, Brighton
epson and silkscreen
edition 100
image size 42.3 x 30 cm
paper size 51.5 x 37 cm
2011

Paris, Sacre-Coeur
epson and silkscreen
edition 100
image size 42.3 x 30 cm
paper size 51.5 x 37 cm
2011

Gwbert on Sea from Poppit
epson and silkscreen
edition 100
image size 42.3 x 30 cm
paper size 51.5 x 37 cm
2011

After Breitbild HZ Siebengebirge
epson and silkscreen
edition 100
image size 42.3 x 30 cm
paper size 51.5 x 37 cm
2011

The Quest For Irma is a series of five limited edition silkscreen prints with 22 colours and glazes. They are reproduced from the series of gouaches that Phillips created in 1973 which relate to the opera Irma composed by Phillips in 1969, itself based on his treated novel A Humument.

Irma represents the ideal woman, her face is never entirely seen, giving her an element of mystery; she could be any woman, anywhere. Irma is not only chased through prose and opera; here she is trailed through the shadow-world of the postcard, from which numerous possible Irma candidates have emerged. She is frequently seen from the back or with her face in shadow, in this manner Phillips freezes time, forever delaying the moment of recognition. We are caught in the powerful moment of ‘could it be?’ with all its anticipation and possibility, which so often gives way to the ‘no’ of broken illusion when the followed turns to face the follower. The Quest for Irma is about unobtainable love, forever just out of reach, and the heightened state of the lover who thinks he sees the object of his affection in the features of strangers on the street.

Phillips’s choice of postcard imagery – found imagery – rather than self-created portraits of what Irma might look like also increases the potency of the idea that Irma could be any woman, or perhaps every woman. It embraces the element of chance, the artist has not created these possible Irma’s, he has found them. Phillips has used postcards as a source material since the late 1960s.

The text used in each print is taken from a single page of A Human Document (the source material of A Humument), the chosen words having been extracted and circled by Phillips, with the rest painted over, though partially visible. Phillips has found and used pages of A Human Document containing fragments of text that are pertinent to the scene represented in the postcard, e.g. in Quest for Irma I the text refers to the ‘summer sea’ and ‘the hours she devoted to watching the waves fall’, or in Quest for Irma III the text refers to ‘wind-swept the beach and the shining sea’. Beneath this each piece is has a footer of stencilled lettering listing the title, details of the postcard used and the date of the original work. These three aspects; the use of postcard imagery, the use of text from A Humument, and Phillips’s stencilled cataloguing of each work, are key motifs throughout the artist’s career and body of work.

Adapted from text published by CCA Galleries