The Night Side of Nature – Responses to Ithell Colquhoun

The oblique, the ambiguous, the hard-to-define is a place of possibilities and of freedom – of hope, even – where meaning is not fixed but in a productive state of flux. These paintings embrace these possibilities and this freedom – taking as a starting point some of the Surrealist image-making methods used by Ithell Colquhoun – but also the wider vision developed in her later life at Lamorna Cove and Paul in Cornwall: elements of chance juxtaposed with precision, the occult with the everyday, the surreal with the commonplace. Images and symbols are the starting point for different, even contradictory trains of thought, or else hover quietly, gleefully unexplained.

More to follow…