The decision to drift is an exhibition of three painters – Amy Blinkhorne, Kristy Gorman, and Emma Smith. These artists explore notions of stillness in varied ways – forms flit, linger, are held and haunt the surfaces. The works slow the viewer in a quiet state of recalibration, of floating observance, residual uneasiness and slow terror.
Amy Blinkhorne’s practice explores the notions of liminality, an in-between space that challenges two or more multiple constructs. Influenced by the experience of distorted sound, as a result of wearing hearing aids, strange spatial interactions take place within the painting’s body and surface. Spaces that are empty or unclear are bound in-between the states of knowing. In these spaces lie the discomfort of uncertainty and unfamiliarity, of no idea and agenda, no gender, no polarities. Until this liminal space becomes the truth, there will always be an, “other”.
In the work of Kristy Gorman forms that are at once familiar and ambiguous are spliced and reconstructed to tease out issues of surface and depth, figure and ground, stability and fragility. Edited observations and tricks of the light are recalled as floating planes hover and shift quietly within the frame and beyond it.
Broadly speaking Emma Smith’s work negotiates the post industrial militarization of culture, a heightened state of urgency/ emergency, the looming certainty of the accident, the potential in temporary wasteland spaces, notions of displacement, reparation and debt, institutional restructures and failures in the (predominantly) painted form. In the series A Brief History of Fire, we see luminous sickly billowing clouds of indeterminate scale on a back drop of impossibly sunny colours.
Image by Kristy Gormin