Trip the Light
Ann Churchill - Coral Churchill - Fearon Gold - Gosia Łapsa-Malawska - Caroline Mackenzie - Damian Rayne
7-24 March 2024
The Muse Gallery 269 Portobello Road London, England, W11 1LR
Catalogue available at the gallery.
This is an exhibition of dreamlands and inner worlds, of representation, symbolism and abstraction. Works by six artists share their subjective and fantastical experiences as they visualise them. The nature of the triptych form allows multiple perspectives to exist simultaneously in one moment. This trinity shapes the works in the exhibition along with a reference to a much evolved but often quoted line from John Milton's (1608-1674), L'Allegro (1645) "Com, and trip it as ye go, On the light fantastick toe." To trip the light here is taken as to dance lightly through the world. In the exhibition, the relationship of image and form to sound, rhythm and movement is used as a playful foil to consider the borderlands of external to internal, the place where the body encounters it's environment and the porousness of this threshold. A lightness of touch, or approach, is achieved by each of the artists as they seek out and celebrate the possibilities of creativity to communicate the invisible or the spiritual.
Work in Exhibition:
Homage to Duncan Grant, 2015
Watercolour on handmade paper
56 x 110cm, double sided
Ann Churchill often brings together layers of existing drawings and sketches into a final cohesive whole. Repetition as a form of ‘honoring’ is something she has found to be a useful approach for her work. When returning to painting in her mid-60s after a prolonged period of more craft-based practice, she often copied small fragments of images and patterns that interested her to understand their composition and why these images touched her. Copying these items from her archive also allows ego and decision making to be held at arm’s length.
On one side of the double-sided watercolour, a more formal arrangement is centered on a repeated ascending animal form. The animal - part giraffe, elephant, or horse - is derived from an image made by Omega workshop and Bloomsbury Group artist Duncan Grant (1885-1978). The Giraffe (along with the Raven) is a spirit guide that chose the artist during shamanic training she undertook in her 40s and 50s whilst bringing up her family. This, alongside the Bloomsbury Group’s radical approach to art and life have been touch-points that she has returned to over her more than sixty years of creative engagement. Surrounding this superimposed circular animal form is an avenue of ‘trees’ (above) and a ‘rocky’ vista (below), in the middle a simple line divides the painting along a horizontal plane. One has a sense of energy rising and moving through a vital fantastical landscape.
On the other side, rock and tree like shapes intermingle in another impossible environment of flowing energy. Here zoomorphic forms appear less naturalistic and more kaleidoscopic, flowing into one another and conjuring an intensely sculptural space on the flat plane of paper. Nonjudgmental in her approach to making Ann exhibits a freedom in her practice, a freedom she protected until recently by not seeking to share her work until, at the encouragement of her children and relations, she stared showing it in 2018. As she said: It was time to come out as an artist.
Elizabeth Neilson, March 2024