TEENAGE KICKS
Idling scribbling fantastical designs in a scrapbook, feint musings become blueprints for banknotes in the State of Thuringia. This deliberate design for unrest confounds the canon - sans-serif in a Rococo frame?! Contradictory calligrammes abound as meaning descends like Apollinaire's Il Pleut. - words and images dissolving in semantic freefall. A borrowed pen set from WH Smith, thin red frames with the posters taken out, these works were made when artists admitted to their tastes and pleasures weren't guilty. Self-conscious but carefree, tentative yet bold, see-sawing between trying too hard and not giving a damn, Topping's adventures in imagism are pseudo-pseudo, deliciously Romantic.
The anatomy and miscellany of memory are both form and content in Topping's craft. The gaps in-between are where we glimpse our own frame of reference, false signposts serving as gateways to free association. Sentiment and semiotics combine in the 'nouvelle conception de la page' and third meanings are anyone's guess. A tangible, bittersweet tension over formalist minutiae is glimpsed through a crack in the studio wall - the wetness and weight of the paper, the opacity of the paint, a delight in the preciousness of these endeavors. And with these tantalizing clues trailing behind her Topping turns on her heel. All that is left is the curious sweep of a monkey's tail, like Lewis Carroll's mouse.
Susannah Thompson for The Changing Room April 2006