The art of making patterns of chairs helps Shaftesbury artist Zara McQueen to tell her own story and those of other families
As a social worker and therapeutic family practitioner, Zara McQueen was used to making “genograms” with clients and patients, using personal papers and objects to help them explore their family backgrounds – but when it came to creating her own, she found she did not want to lay out her life like that.
Instead, the Shaftesbury artist hit on the idea of telling her story through patterns of chairs. The inspiration came from looking around her at the studio at Arts University Bournemouth (AUB) where she was studying for an MA in Fine Art.
‘I noticed the chairs pushed up against the walls – brightly coloured plastic university chairs, marked with paint and studio life,’ she writes in the book of photographs which she produced after this unusual project. ‘I began to move them, transforming functional, splattered pieces of furniture into me and my family.’
As she explored relationships – two chairs was ‘a love story’ – and recreated the convoluted patterns of her extended families, with its journeys and multiple divorces, she decided to find out what chairs meant to other people. She invited a wide range of people to send an image and answer the question, Why this chair? The result is an extraordinary diversity not only of pieces of everyday furniture but of memories, ideas and individual stories.
Coloured plastic chairs were an immediately eye-catching feature of Zara’s latest exhibition at Shaftesbury Arts Centre, where visitors could both engage with the three-dimensional aspect – by sitting on or moving a chair – and explore other forms of genogram, in subtly-coloured geometric paintings and delightful mobiles. She says: ‘I have no idea where the current body of work will take me, but I am enjoying the exploration. Using chairs as stand-ins for people, making mobiles as well as drawings and paintings, is liberating.’
Landscapes of the mind
Zara is best-known as a painter of atmospheric and engaging landscapes and you could call her recent paintings ‘landscapes of the mind’ – but it is also clear that landscape is her natural artistic form, and it is evident from the recent exhibition that it is creeping back into her work.
She was born in London, into a Jewish family with a complicated background that included numerous divorces and remarriages, and with a great-grandmother who came to England from Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century. Zara was ‘totally dyslexic’ and painting and drawing were her favourite subjects. She wanted to go to art school but only finally achieved her ambition when she was 60, studying for an MA in Fine Art at Arts University Bournemouth (AUB) where she graduated in 2023 with a distinction.
‘This course was my first formal art training. I always wanted to go to art school, and I got there, eventually! It was an amazing experience and a real privilege to study with some exceptional tutors and peers,’ she says.
She went to AUB with a primary focus on making paintings and collages inspired by the landscape around Shaftesbury. But gradually, with the chair project developing, she began to produce paintings and mobiles which were inspired by and re-created the squares and circles of family groups. Now, a year on, her work is once again changing as the geometric shapes are increasingly influenced by landscape forms.
Zara has lived in Shaftesbury for 30 years and cites the encouragement of the local community as an important factor in her success as an artist. She says: ‘I have had so much support from local people – they have been to my exhibitions and bought my art.’
The university course and the recent developments in her art follow a diagnosis of breast cancer and the inevitable emotional response. ‘I did a lot of deep diving and my work got very autobiographical,’ she says. ‘My art comes from me – it has always kept me sane.’
Zara has exhibited widely in Dorset and Wiltshire. Two recent works have been selected for the Royal West of England Academy’s 171st Annual Open Exhibition.
* A genogram is a graphic representation of a family tree that displays detailed data on relationships among individuals. It goes beyond a traditional family tree by allowing the user to analyse hereditary patterns and psychological factors that punctuate relationships. Genograms allow therapist and patient to identify and understand various patterns in the patient’s family history which may have had an influence on the patient’s current state of mind – Genopro.com
