Extracts from an essay by Gillian Wylde
Artist and senior lecturer in Fine Art at Falmouth University.
These paintings re-consider what might take place within momentary instances of seeing; they are an exploration of the ways in which sight, memory and perception interact. The work engages with the uncertainty and fallibility of seeing and the senses. These paintings are a translation of, and receptiveness to, intimate time spent within place and nature.
Nature is of course, always changing, always in flux. The paintings respond to these unpredictable, fleeting moments of naturally occurring optical phenomenon and distortions to the senses. Experienced physically and biologically, in place and in time, something is present that was not there before. The experience is recovered after a lapse in time, through memory.
Pictured: "The Small Stuff" (detail) – winner of the Wells Art Contemporary 2020 Howden Art Award.
In these paintings distance and division of fore and background are difficult to gauge. A dynamic iteration of data, fast shape or form, synthetic space or scattered light, heightens abstraction and ambiguity. The work does not inhabit space easily; it might be said that the work emits a restlessness. The paintings would seem to oscillate, moving continuously and with such rapidity so as to be indiscernible to the eye. Shapes and lines shimmer and flicker and at the same time are calm, persistent, keen.
There is almost the sense that the work shifts shape when not looked at, teasing at the limits of our peripheral vision.
