Artist Tricia Gilman has been a name to be reckoned with for the past three decades. In her latest exhibition at The Cello Factory, near Waterloo, she explores her interest in the brain, a kind of negotiated looking, which slows down and spotlights awareness as it flows. The mind’s eye journey is also investigated. These accumulated moments, (pieces of drawing, rubbings, collage, found surfaces, studio debris, or notes one’s written to oneself, ) are pieced together to enact a direct transference of real, haphazard everyday things into this open-ended and non-hierarchical document. This might take the form of a map, a diary, a list, a dictionary, structured perhaps, as a stack, a scatter, a string: a sequence, piece by piece.
The particularity of how something is made and structured, however basic, concentrates one’s looking on just this bit now. A just is-ness. Each mark needs to have the “now” focus of a fly crawling across a window pane…and yet to question the possibilities, of being able to make connections between systems and meaning, to encounter the dilemmas of signs, through just being aware that we are here, and looking, in real time.
“Tricia Gillman (born 1951) is an artist who clearly loves paint. In this latest show, she toys with us both visual and philosophically”.
“What is remarkable about this work, is that in the constantly increasing sophistication of its playful deployment of mark, image and sign, and its varieties of formal experiment and invention, it has constantly retained that signature tension between the emotional and the intellectual, the risky poise – if that is the right word – between the problematically linguistic (so to speak) and the joyfully hedonistic. Like all truly gifted artists, she cannot escape from the determinations of her creative predispositions and critical preoccupations: her painting is essentially philosophical”.
Her recent work takes us to an altogether higher plane of aesthetic achievement. **** Recommended.