Home Culture Art exhibition – Wanderings at Patriothall Gallery

Art exhibition – Wanderings at Patriothall Gallery

September 7, 2023 3:45 pm

An exhibition opens on Saturday at Patriothall Gallery in Stockbridge which includes the work of three artists.

The work of Lynsey MacKenzie, Rowan Paton and Julie-Ann Simpson explores contemporary imagined space.

“Meandering through a painted landscape in which the path is drawn, erased and remade, Wanderings celebrates painting’s materiality and power to reveal new worlds.

“To wander is to move without a fixed course, rambling; to go astray. To walk without a destination. Often, this is when we discover something new – and the same is true in painting. These painters share a love of wandering, inviting chance to play a role in the work, allowing themselves to divert off-course when the need arises. ‘Wondering’; that uncertainty and curiosity essential in art-making, often works hand-in-hand with our wandering, prompted by the mystery and possibility of drifting into the unknown.

“And that is precisely where we end up. If paintings are mirrors, they are many-sided. These works reflect back personal histories, dreams, lush landscapes and mythological otherworlds. Through their various processes, the artists have created worlds that resist being fixed: in MacKenzie’s energetic, tactile brushstrokes; in Paton’s shifting planes of kaleidoscopic colour; and in Simpson’s unearthly, numinous realms.”

The artists

MacKenzie’s process is intuitive and is driven by memory and feeling of place. She is interested in painting’s relationships to place and time, through the non-linear accumulation of imagery and forms. Compositional concerns such as relationships between colours, and the materiality of the paint, together with speed or slowness of marks are driving forces in her work.

Paton’s work explores materiality, mark making, colour and language. Employing appropriated and self-made imagery, she creates imagined spaces, external and internal. Her work affords her a route to unpick timeless, persistent human challenges such as oppressive feelings of isolation, depression, grief. Landscape often comes to the fore providing a reference through which to explore these.

Simpson is an artist inspired by the senses, evoking harmonic rhythm, recent memory, absence surrounded by presence, the abstracted forms act as a series of random echoes, with the resultant canvases blurring the mark between a reminiscent dream or the experienced actuality.