‘Wall to Wall’ at the Union Gallery is an exhibition of paintings, drawings and monoprints. It is my first solo show in a commercial Edinburgh gallery for over thirty years and coincides with my 60th birthday. It runs from March 6th – 28th, 2020.
‘Wall to Wall’ is an exhibition of works based on the theme of enclosed spaces, but which also revolves round revisiting. The black and white prints are collaged from old monoprints going back nearly thirty five years. This same approach is taken in the collaged drawings, many of which come from student days and even a few from my entrance portfolio in 1981 (look out for hyper-real gym shoes with stitching!).
This recycling theme is carried in to the paintings. Some are painted on old canvases, using what was there before as starting points. Others are painted on fresh canvas. The titles come from words now rarely used in the English language; such as ‘appelency’ which means longing or desire and ‘commons’ which means shared food.
Themes from the past, such as still life, rose gardens, figures, interiors, and abstraction are revisited and fused to give them a new life. I looked through over a hundred sketchbooks spanning my career to bring together these interests and introduced some more recent ones. The paintings, drawings and prints revolve around rooms or gardens and feature enclosed spaces. Figures, objects and furniture populate these spaces which are ambiguous and dream-like, hinting at entrapment and escape. This coming together of influences from the past work and the desire to create something new has led to exciting directions where the picture plane is more broken up. The resultant tableaux speak of loss, memory and invention. They are imaginative spaces that can be explored nostalgically and with curiosity for what is about to unfold.
