Artists in the show:

helen bermingham, hannah rose dumes, ebru duruman, laura garcia karras, rema ghuloum, lauren anaïs hussey, rhiannon inman-simpson, caroline jackson, sofia nifora, Emma Stone-Johnson, vickie vainionpää

Taymour Grahne Projects is excited to announce the launch of Abstraction - Group Show, the gallery's fifth Satellite group exhibition, featuring an exciting line up of female artists exploring the possibilities of abstract painting today. Accompanying the exhibition is a text by Bryony Bodimeade.

A Curving Thought
by Bryony Bodimeade

Here is the flux of paint: offering myriad morphic ways to conjure, undermine and combine. There is opticality, trickery and doubt; hesitation, persistence and devotion. Forms dance back and forth in likeness between the vegetative, mineral and bodily. Slippery, lively things that are not discrete entities, but porous and interconnected. Circulatory systems of movement and transformation create gut-like metabolisms: matter turns into meaning, seeming into being, and back again. A range of techniques and technologies – digital, mechanical, handmade – often used in representational painting, combine with expressive impulses of gestural abstraction and the outcomes of material processes, producing meeting points that seem to bridge dimensions.

Curving, wriggly shapes offer premises for ways of thinking that are unwieldy and entwined. In some places, these shapes are the marks of bodily movement: gestural sweeps through space. In others, gestures are present as images of themselves: a kind of mediation of a scribble. Elsewhere, they correspond with a more representational relationship to organic forms – describing body parts, plants, environmental features.

A number of the artists work without preliminary sketches or existing imagery as visual reference, and the process of painting is largely unplanned. Through subjective interpretative acts, Caroline Jackson, Rhiannon Inman Simpson and Helen Bermingham’s paintings become unfolding records of unpredictable endeavours. They are both the journey and destination of physical struggles within which body-like marks seem a natural outcome. But, as marks that can flow and merge fluidly into each other, they are also strategically compositional relational elements that lend themselves to integration and cohesion. They are connective pieces that bring a painting into being and hold it together.

In Jackson’s paintings, instinctive decisions and freeform movements are returned to and re-entered; initial sweeps are reinscribed with tiny brush marks, simultaneously undoing and reinforcing them. Tangled strokes reach a fragile state of harmony and balance: somewhere in between a nest and a snare. There is an in-out dynamic to looking at them, where moments of pause suggest holes to peer through, and dense knotty shapes seem to stare back out.

Cyclical interplays of solidity and weightlessness in Inman Simpson’s work create equivalencies between mind-body experiences of environment and painterly qualities. Meandering movements relate the process of painting to the wondering act of walking: a thinking through doing; a doing that is thoughtful. Connecting the commonplace, exploratory, pedestrian natures of both processes, she explores how the body encounters and learns place, through skin and eyes and feet and ears. Sometimes she takes written notes, playing with translations and transitions of bodily sensation into language, then word into gesture.

Bermingham’s paintings are made up of an array of marks repeated from previous pieces. Sections are extracted, blown up and introduced into a new environment, where their fluidity helps them re-fit together. Genealogies of marks can be traced back through paintings all the way to long ago source material. The changes they undergo are like the distortion of memory through recollection, yet there is an onward, self-propelling momentum. She doesn’t return to these source materials: the paintings develop through a process of cross-fertilisation and growth.

In Ebru Duruman’s teratoma-like compositions, the playful changeability of slow-drying oil paint is morphic, monstrous and sensuous as it slides indistinctly between bodily figuration and painterly abstraction. Viscous paint, silken skin and jagged flesh are whipped and scraped, blended, dusted and smeared. Fleetingly explicit forms seem to curl from billowing smoke. Textural ripples of multicolour-laden-brushmarks echo the contoured flow of toes, while decisive curving strokes trace the silhouettes of feminine figures and meat-grinding machinery. In regurgitative cycles, concrete, tangible forms feed into and mangle each other, becoming ever stranger and lighter.

The interaction between form and formlessness is taken up in Vickie Vainionpää’s Rigid and Curved paintings, where tubular splines undergo cyborg-like transitions from hard reflective matter to pillowy softness. Digital pathways mapped by a randomised and automated process disconnect the tie between gesture and self. By removing her own agency at this stage, Vainionpää creates a foundational loss of control: an unknowable beginning to start from. Her agency, and hand, is then reinscribed as she digitally edits colour, texture and light, before painting the compositions onto raw canvas – seeking to create a balance (in both image and process) between rigidity and squishiness: between a mathematical, scientific way of seeing and an emotional, freeform sense of movement.

Encounters with digital, biological and ecological creative processes recur throughout the exhibition. Where Vainionpää’s compositions are a result of automated chance, Laura Garcia Karras and Sofia Nifora’s depict the growth patterns of stems and leaves reaching towards the light. The searching, bending trajectories of the plants are translated into digitally-manipulated then hand-painted configurations. These sprawling pathways across the canvas create routes for the transmission of energy. They show signs of growth, growth of types, types of sign. They point around the surface, saying ‘look there’, whilst being also an imprint of an action, as well as a picture of a plant. Petals and leaves are made up of gradient fades of light and colour that appear like holes through to deep space: intangible, an absence of substance – but also a truth about paint and light as generative forces.

With crisp edges, drop shadows and smooth fades, Karras connects the language of digital collage and optical deception to the seductive appeal of the botanical. The sumptuousness of paint hovers like a thin veneer, and disorienting strategies (such as creating an illusory reveal of the underneath of the painting) add to its alluring artifice. In her combination of painterly, natural and digital sublimity, the relationship that each has to inaccessible desire is contingent on the others’: they are being continually nourished and consumed by each other’s promise.

With crisp edges, drop shadows and smooth fades, Karras connects the language of digital collage and optical deception to the seductive appeal of the botanical. The sumptuousness of paint hovers like a thin veneer, and disorienting strategies (such as creating an illusory reveal of the underneath of the painting) add to its alluring artifice. In her combination of painterly, natural and digital sublimity, the relationship that each has to inaccessible desire is contingent on the others’: they are being continually nourished and consumed by each other’s promise.

The impact of psychological forces such as desire and longing on depictions and abstractions of the natural world is explored too in Nifora’s devotional rendering of tangled weeds. Rooted in technical classical drawing, her precise methodological approach is akin to weaving, or architectural drawing. Her gathered photographs of wild untrimmed grasses are drawn faithfully, one to one, becoming increasingly abstracted through a restrained process of detailing, framing and digital manipulation. By slowly and carefully mirroring the grasses’ gestures, her paintings accumulate and complicate, both expressing and hiding things within themselves. They seemingly propose a tangible image of a mind-space that is wild and womb-like, complex and comforting: offering openings from which things might emerge, be followed and let go of.

Colour laid into a loose grid structure is often a starting point for Hannah Rose Dumes’ paintings, on which she builds her shapes: finetuning them as they exist in the space. Working large, fast and intuitively, she creates a rhythmic push and pull between the responsive organic forms and the skeletal framework that they develop around. An equilibrium between them is reached, through an interplay of transparency and opacity, vibrancy and tone, light touch and complexity, until the whole surface appears alive: scrunched and puckered with tension. As though it could breathe in and out.

Existing seemingly on both vast and tiny scales, Rema Ghuloum’s paintings vibrate with equivalences and difference. Made through a laborious process of pouring, painting and sanding, they are built up then flattened in layers. Atmospheric contrasts, transitions of density and tonal variety emerge, at a granular level, through the forces of addition and subtraction, creating intricate veils of coloured debris and residue. Everything that has happened to the painting affected all of it, and they ask to be experienced as such: slowly, intently and all at once. There is no foreground nor background – but gradually, with looking, things start to differentiate themselves. Flat surface dissolves into mesh, then into illusional forms, and depth. The process accumulates at the edges of the canvas, producing an optical pulsing effect of spatial contraction and expansion.

Although Ghuloum’s practice might be understood as rigorously process-based, it is not a puritanically materialist or formal process, but one that is improvisatory and meditative. She says that she feels as though the paintings create themselves – and she is responding. They emerge with a creative force and psychic intensity of their own, from a process of which she is just a part.

Questions of control, consciousness and liveliness reverberate across the show. Various painterly processes express mediations between material, biological, emotional, technological, spiritual forces: conversations, tussles or games – with moves and counter moves. Within these interactions, what else is being introduced? What things are the artists putting between themselves and the work, or themselves and their source?

Emma Stone-Johnson’s studio practice involves the creation of large hand-made brushes, which she prepares and loads like birthday cakes, as well as writing as a way of connecting and abstracting. Both these hard and soft measures prepare and charge her process. Across her paintings, diffuse swathes of watery pigment are punctuated by calligraphic, choreographic leaps and landings that skid and sink over and into the surface. Poetic language seems to sharpen and make more particular the relationship between tool and canvas, as though the splots and daubs have been made more conscious by having a word in mind.

Also interested in the intersection of visual abstraction and language, Lauren Hussey combines fragments of illegible text, scribbled marks and blurred low-res images to create highly composed arrangements that tap into our desire to make sense of things. Unintended, intuitive and residual forms and effects are articulated, framed and harmonised. They take on enticing, perplexing logics as they relate and distinguish themselves. Horizontal and vertical tonal fades both fill and are overlaid by spiralling calligraphic forms creating a multidimensional weave, interposed by ink blots and their shadows. An illusory intangible grid hovers like a mirage on the cusp of warping into oblivion.

Almost-grid-like arrangements appear in different configurations throughout the exhibition: a woven nest, a crumpled web, a knotty bundle. Unlike the rigid grid’s conceptual and functional opposition to mental and visual disorientation, the effect of the accumulation of intersecting curves is bewildering and weird. In their visualisation of ecological thinking, Timothy Morton writes ‘the mesh is made of insubstantial stuff, and its structure is very strange.’ Made of holes and threads, densities and delicacies, the mesh suggests a composite infinitude of interconnected life systems.

In this group of paintings, coiled, braided, overlapping marks enfold and compress, becoming held together in interdependent states of delicate balance. In continual relational shifts, they traverse surface and space, and shift nimbly from abstraction to recognisable form. Responsive to other marks and the confines of the rectangle, they seem to be both conscious of the frame and to reach out beyond the edges of the canvas, tickling the world beyond.