Seeing, Feeling, Forgetting

“Making a painting is so hard, it makes you crazy ... You have to simultaneously diagnose, predict and ignore the past, present and future, all at once; you have to remember and to forget at the same time.” - Amy Sillman 

Karl Bielik, Julie Caves, Jody DeSchutter, Michele Fletcher, Mark Jackson, Michael Lawton, Patrick Lears, Johanna Melvin, Alice Peillon, Ian Whitfield, Clare Wilson 

The artists chosen for this exhibition Seeing Feeling Forgetting have a distinct individual intimacy with and between their chosen material, process and object. Their work tips between abstraction and representation with as much being said in the brushwork, texture, colour and paint as in the final image.  

For them, the solitude of the studio is a place that culminates with the channelling of experience into the intuitive act of making. However, in order to create, they have to let go of the concrete, savour the moment of making and forget the initial impetus for that act. This exhibition is a meditation on the solitude of a painter in the studio and that moment in time when the artist and work become something beyond the sum of its parts.  

Karl Bielik makes visceral process driven oil paintings where the surface evolves out of chance encounters between marks and colour, the paintings are often heavily layered and reveal the history of their making.

Julie Caves is a painter interested in abstraction, ambiguity, colour, still life, and sunlit spaces.

Jody De Schutter’s work collides the familiar and the unknown, inviting the viewer down unarticulated corridors of mutating ideas.

Michele Fletcher’s paintings, informed by the natural world, are shaped through choices dictated by ground, colour, and mark-making – the entire process building upon itself.

Mark Jackson’s paintings capture shards of time, memory and material—the personal, the philosophical and political, albeit obliquely, and can be seen to be works that have 'capturing' as their main agenda.

Michael Lawton is an artist working with painting and writing. He uses the language of abstraction to narrate verbal, lived or speculative moment.

Patrick Lears interested in the ideogrammatic. Painterly representations of an idea, concept or feeling independent of a particular or fixed language.

Johanna Melvin is a painter whose work references architectural detail and the everyday experience of living in an urban/suburban environment. Her use of colour, form, gesture and hard-edges respond to the ordinary and sometimes extra-ordinary.

At the centre of Alice Peillon’s work is a search for a balance between precision and randomness, and an attempt to find systems within the interaction of discordant pictorial elements.

Ian Whitfield’s paintings are part of an ongoing sequence of clusters of work that, through the process of their making, respond to, or play towards, figurative imagery, but are not specifically figurative in their final state.

Clare Wilson’s work investigates ways in which the process and materiality of painting relates to the experience of landscape and the tension between real and imagined spaces.