I’m taking down the work for Gesture this Friday, so you’ve only got about more day to see it.
Gesture brings together myself and the wonderful Wendy Fransella at Level Best Gallery in Colchester, in a celebration of mark-making, colour and form.
Here’s Wendy with the show…
It is always a pleasure to show with Wendy, and I was particularly happy to have the opportunity to bring our work together again. Here’s her work below.
Our practices are very different, but there is something lovely about the conversation that happens between them, the contrast between bold blocks of vivid colour and more sensitive layers of washes, marks and shifting tones.
And it is very good to be back at Level Best after a couple of years away.
It is such a lovely space, made even better by the beautiful people who run it and make it feel like a genuinely welcoming place for artists and audiences.
If you’re in the Colchester area, do go and have a look.
The exhibition runs until 27 August, Monday–Friday, 8.30am–4.30pm, at Level Best Gallery, 26 St John’s Street, Colchester, Essex CO2 7HB.
The work
Alongside some previously exhibited work (see top image) I have made some paintings specifically for the show. These very recent paintings I have included in Gesture are part of my ongoing exploration of memory, place and the things that are difficult to hold onto.
I have been thinking a lot about memories of places, events and emotions that become increasingly intangible over time.
What happens to a memory when the physical place has changed, when the people who inhabited it are gone? What do we remember accurately, and what do we reconstruct? And perhaps most importantly, what do we do with the feelings that remain when the details begin to disappear?
There is a tension in these paintings between the things that feel vivid and the things that are already fading.
My recent paintings use an intentionally complementary colour palette inspired by the clothes, places of play and interiors I remember from my childhood. They are, in many ways, my ghosts of families and homes.
There is affection in them. Love and sadness. I don’t want these paintings to become sentimental recreations of a childhood that never quite existed. Instead, I am trying to hold the contradictions. The happiness alongside the hurt. The remembered moments of safety alongside the things that made me feel unsafe. The people I loved alongside the complicated realities of who they were.
I am interested in the way memory edits and the way we layer new experiences over old ones. The way we can remember a feeling much more clearly than we can remember the circumstances that produced it.
The paintings are therefore not attempts to reconstruct the past accurately. And perhaps, most importantly, to offer compassion to the people I have become old enough to understand differently.
I can see the histories they carried, the things they didn’t know how to deal with, and the ways in which their own experiences shaped the lives around them. That doesn’t erase what happened. But it does allow another perspective. These paintings are my attempt to hold that complexity.
Messages across time
There are also hidden messages within the paintings. I have written obscured words to family members who are lost. They sit beneath or within the layers, becoming part of the physical construction of the painting rather than something immediately available to the viewer.
An attempt to reach people who can no longer answer. Perhaps an attempt to say things that couldn’t be said at the time.
Perhaps simply a way of acknowledging that those relationships still exist somewhere within me. The words don’t necessarily need to be read. Their presence is enough. They become another layer of memory. Another mark.
Another gesture.