TONDO COSMIC

Text and concept by Gilly Fox

 

At the Flood features four artists, Jo Chate, Sarah Longworth-West, Tamsin Morse, and Flora Parrott, whose seemingly effortless practices belie the toil, trial, and error that prefigure each composition. Through paintings, collages, and works on paper, these four artists demonstrate how years of experimentation, successes, and failures in the studio can lead to a mature and distinctive mastery of process, style, and technique.

 
Despite what some would have you believe, no one is born an artist. It is a skill nurtured through quotidian practice, and a calling fueled by curiosity to understand both the world and themselves. What is rarely considered when we see the final work presented is the journey the artist may have gone upon to arrive at this place - the small eureka flashes, that turn happy accidents into foundational shifts in understanding and progression. It can come from little moments, such as drying times, or the humidity when making your canvas bases; the point when erasure will leave just the right amount of residue from previous paint when lifted away; junctures where certainty and randomness can combine with confidence to create each image. At the Flood signals a moment in all these women’s careers where this important developmental time spent is coming to fruition through ever increasing recognition, exhibitions and awards, after years honing their craft. 

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Gilly Fox is an Associate Curator at Hayward Gallery Touring, Southbank Centre, London.  She is also a visiting Lecturer at Norwich University on the BA Fine Art and the Chair of the Board of Trustees at The Film and Video Umbrella and on the board at The Stuart Croft Foundation.

 

Jo Chate is a painter whose paintings present close illusions of reality. Playing with negative space, reflection and distortion, the paintings operate across a seemingly three-dimensional plane which push and pull towards abstraction. The figurative also exist in this proxy state; as in these works mannikins stand as a simulacrum for women; offering an alternate reality to the female ideal. Questioning the representation of women within art as merely a form of which an idea can hang, much of Jos’ processes and influences reference renaissance painting and compositional form.

 

Sarah Longworth-Wests’ works are part-painting, part-sculptural relief. Each work emerges like as though from a Rorschach print reading, the composition signalled by the background underpainting, formed of a particular blend of plaster, glue-size, and pigment perfected after years of trial and error. Taking this foundation, Sarah adds further thin layers of plaster pigment, then either sands into the surface to knock areas back or forward. Held on this complex foundation, small images – concerns and connections the artist has been turning over in her mind - find their natural place thanks to what the surface conjures; be they iron age remnants, the ponytail of her child or disposable consumer culture.

 

Tamsin Morse is a painter whose narratives blend contemporary issues with art history and classical myths and symbolism. Drawing parallels between the past and the present - depictions of Zeus and Greek Gods stand next to Free Palestine protesters and Tommy Robinson supporters, each character seamlessly blends to build a tableau that transcends time and skews indexical meaning. Frenetically layered, the works demonstrate the organic process of narrative and the evolvement of imagery as an ongoing social commentary on the ever-looping nature of mankind’s histories, and the stories we tell to explain and justify our actions.

 

Flora Parrotts’ collages explore interior landscapes of the body, thinking through the unseen workings and sensations that occur under the skin. It often takes the form of tableau or 3-dimensional collage, using everyday objects and experiences to reimagine the mysteries of blurry ultrasound images, the insides of deep, dark pockets and the points at which inside meets outside. Textured and with parts that layer upon each other, each different element is created so they can be achieved in a domestic setting in the spare-time Flora has as she cares for her two young children, to be pulled together in her studio where a recognisable internal monologue of concerns, of care, health and our effect on the world, seep into each work.

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At the Flood is Curated by Gilly Fox, invited by Tondo Cosmic, for the Union Club in London courtesy of Roz Arratoon.

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