Rhythmic Dreaming at the Edge of a Storyline
November 2024
ASC Gallery, London
installation image @vinx_imagehead
I am absorbed by the fluidity of imagery, where ideas originate and how images are created. This drives my curiosity about how stories evolve and borders dissolve so that pockets of practice spill into one another. My research centres around personal narratives, mythologies and reconsidered histories, within themes of survival, memory and evolutionary processes. The resulting work tends to play out in a multitude of dualities: logic and organic, rhythmic and free spirited, expression and perception, intuition and mechanical precision, movement and holding patterns.
My abstract paintings seek to unpack and expose the layered process of image making, encouraging the viewer to consider the parts that make up the whole they are otherwise presented with. This splays the image into a material making process over time, questioning the reliability of defining a present moment. It’s a way of exploring how paintings and people begin, develop and finally appear in the world. Juggling intention and the impromptu, the compositions are comprised of geometric structures (eg. zigzags, folds, purposeful devices for hiding and revealing) biomorphic forms (influenced by eg. anime, biology, bodies of water, the immediacy of light in the studio) as well as windows of raw canvas pointing to ground or source material.
I normally use a range of water based paints – liquid acrylics, watercolour, gouache and raw pigments – in an effort to keep image making as fluid as possible. Unlike oil painting, there is no possibility of subtraction; only addition. Every move becomes an account of making that cannot be undone, unless the paint is sanded back, which then exposes a visible record of removal rather than a hidden process. The final work both evokes and depicts a sense of perpetual flux and the impossibility of precise clarification. At times, it is extended with sound, physical sculpture and ekphrastic flash fiction. And alongside, it is accompanied by interviewing for Art Fictions podcast and creative essay writing.
Recent Exhibition Highlights:
Rhythmic Dreaming at the Edge of a Storyline, solo exhibition, ASC Gallery, November 2024
Spectrum, White Noise Projects and Artist Support Pledge Collaboration, One Paved Court Gallery, September 2024
The Waves Beside Them Danced, ARC Studios, June 2024
It Rose and It Fell, Terrace Gallery, May 2024
Emerging Artists, Dodomu Gallery New York, May 2024
Outside/In, SET Ealing, February – March 2024
STABLE, Bobinska Brownlee, December 2023 – January 2024
Art Fictions Podcast
Art Fictions Podcast
Art Fictions celebrates stories of art and the art of stories. Beginning in text form, then as a podcast in 2020, it is a way of talking about art in parallel to the work. In this sense, it draws on peripheral vision and how we ingest so much beyond our direct line of sight. This might also be thought of as “site”, questioning where the work is situated, which is of course, normally beyond the edges of itself.
Art Fictions is an abridged, self-produced series, and for each episode, the guest artist discusses their work, through the lens of a piece of fiction of their choosing. Together with one of the hosts – Jillian Knipe – Elizabeth Fullerton – Pelumi Odubanjo – Vanessa Murrell – the artist explores the book’s themes, context and characters, which opens up and steers a rich conversation about their work. The podcast bounces back and forth between artworks and text, often meandering around other inspiring books and artists, all the while focussing on the ideas which govern both. It aims to get close and personal with the origins of artistic ideas.
See @artfictionspodcast on instagram for images of works and links, and check out the podcast notes for the references mentioned throughout the conversation.
