Breathing Space

Hiya

I've been meaning to write something about your work for a while Rose - here goes!

I encountered your work for the first time at your degree show exhibition at LJMU Art and Design Academy earlier this summer. It was a big group exhibition with each artist taking a portion of the space of the top floor of the building. You were displaying three paintings, but instead of just hanging them on a white wall, you had integrated other objects into how we viewed the works. One painting was surrounded by a much larger canvas stretcher, another one incorporated breeze blocks (I think!) and another.........aaargh, I've forgotten, sorry!

Anyway, the main idea was that you were showing objects alongside, with, and as part of your paintings. This meant that there was an expanded area of activity for the viewer to take in, when piecing together the work and what it might mean.

Within the work, you had a painting of a brick wall, but with slashes of a dark colour interrupting the more familiar brick pattern. Other pieces had more of a familiar landscape composition to them, with a horizon line leading the eye. But with each painting there was a different perspective explored, unsettling the viewer and asking us to question quite what we're looking at and why. The brick wall piece for example was upfront, there wasn't a narrative there that I detected, or if there was it is pretty abstract.

I could really do with a more prolonged time looking at these pieces, so I'll pop my head into your space when I'm next in the studio. It's a bit hazey at the moment, as to your degree show installation. But the first thing that definitely struck me as I looked at the paintings was the fact that you placed them in a more sculptural / object context, where their narratives can spill into the space.

This is something that I haven't really explored in my work, tending to focus on what's going on in the rectangle of the painting, as opposed to what's outside it. I guess I would start to consider a paintings object-ness when I come to exhibit it, but to actively go after that in the studio before exhibiting it something I probably wouldn't do.

How did you come to integrate objects in the installations with your paintings? Does the selection of objects evolve in parallel as you work on the painting?

For me to consider these more expanded interpretations of how painting and paintings can be viewed is good! That sounds a bit waffily, but I think it's great to have conversations with a painter thats pushing at the edges of the medium into new spaces, whereas with me I'm sort of wrestling with everything that goes into the rectangle (maybe you're the other way around!). Maybe the space outside of the canvas provides some breathing space! Maybe I should look there!

Before I ramble on for too long, I remembered you had the idea of pushing a painting into the corner. Was it to do with reflecting a mood or feeling? or a dejected object? I can't quite remember, but you said it was something you wanted to try out in a space. It seemed quite a simple action, but underpinned with an emotional significance of some sort (?). It seemed to chime with my ideas of exploring emotions in painting, but in quite a different, more direct way. Pinning your colours to the mast.

Before I go, I just thought I'd put down a few words capturing some of the moods of your paintings:

Grey skies, browns, bricks, drips here and there at the end of large brush marks and actions, light layers, weather, landscape, muddy colours but not a muddy painting, hints of trees, tears (as in ripping something apart) - we should put some images of your work up on the blog as well!

bye for now