Patrick Caulfield: Pause on the Landing
From January 19; British Library, London

“Is it not a shame to make two chapters of what passed in going down one pair of stairs?” asks Tristram Shandy, half way through Lawrence Sterne’s novel of the same name, “for we are got no farther yet than to the first landing, and there are fifteen more steps down to the bottom; and for aught I know, …there may be as many chapters as steps”.

Well might the fictional narrator be concerned; determined to leave nothing out of his life story, Tristram Shandy gives equal attention to every passing distracted thought. With endless pauses for reflection, in all nine volumes, his autobiography never makes it past the day of his birth.

It is an astounding book, centuries ahead of its 18th century origins. When after six chapters his two characters have still not budged from that landing, the frustrated author is finally forced to call upon a hack writer to get them off the stairs.

For the late Patrick Caulfield, a London-based painter of the Pop Art generation, Tristram Shandy was an obsession. It’s not difficult to see why. Caulfield would reduce a glimpse of a window, a lamp, or a piece of office equipment to the barest formal essentials, investing it with the same dignity as a grand portrait.

When Samuel Coleridge praised Sterne, he might equally have been speaking of Caulfield, for the “bringing forward into distinct consciousness those minutiae of thought and feeling which appear trifles, have an importance [only]for the moment, and yet almost every man feels in one way or other.”

Caulfield, who died last September, was so fond of the novel that he arranged for part of it to be performed in his own home. In the grand plan for the British Library, a space has always been kept for a Caulfield tapestry inspired by Tristram Shandy. The space is a landing, and the subject is those six emblematic chapters, half way down the stairs, during which two characters pause for thought.

Caulfield painted his design for the tapestry in 1994, and over the past 11 years he has worked with Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh to bring it to life in wool. This Thursday, the tapestry will be unveiled at the British Library. Interest in it should be piqued by the coincidental release of Michael Winterbottom’s A Cock And Bull Story, based on Tristram Shandy, the following day.

The 10 by 14 foot tapestry towers above you, its three abstract characters vivid against an expanse of maroon. A huge triangular nose, with more than a hint of Picasso about it, refers to an accident with the forceps at Tristram’s birth. The green clock with its winding mechanism reminds us of the moment of the hero’s conception, when his mother interrupted his father with the immortal words, “Pray, my dear, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?”

In Caulfield’s painting, the background is thickly slapped on, its peaks and troughs reflecting the light. Translating the paint into wool, the weavers first tried a single colour field but decided that it looked too flat. So, rather than copy the brushstrokes slavishly, they worked out a subtle mix of maroons, woven in ragged patches into the background.

The design is unusually abstract for Caulfield. Human figures are faintly recognisable in a pattern of steps, which also doubles as military earthworks. A crutch, representing Uncle Toby, also bears elements of a military costume. Caulfield packs the design with idiosyncratic objects, each plucked from the narrative with its own trailing residue of significance.

While the painter is best known for evoking a single place at a single moment in time, here he has chopped up time and place, as Sterne does in his fragmented narrative, to cram it all back together in one bewildering statement. The resulting tapestry is undeniably odd, but it’s one of those things, if you pause long enough, that you might easily grow to love.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 15.01.06