HENRY WARD 

“I work primarily as a painter, but also make drawings and small sculptures. I am interested in exploring the language of paint by investigating the threshold between abstraction and representation. I maintain three specific sites of practice; my kitchen table, where I make small objects, my shed, where I paint on paper, and my studio. These three spaces create an ongoing dialogue between different ways of working and different paces. The paintings in the shed are rapidly made, with intuitive revisions and reworkings. The more realised works, made over longer periods of time in the studio, are informed by both these and the small objects.

I am interested in making paintings that refer to objects and spaces in the real world without being nameable, I want things to feel familiar and alien at the same time. I am fascinated by paint and the way in which it can do multiple things simultaneously, being both material on a flat surface and creating the illusion of space.”

KATE SHOOTER 

Kate’s approach to painting has always been process driven. A fast conversation between mark and response allowing subconscious narrative to bubble up through the layers. Works often hover in that liminal space between abstraction and figuration. Teetering as always on the brink of knowable this ‘body’ of work seems to be exactly that… the artist’s experience of her physical self. Via enigmatic suggestions of body parts, fantastical x-rays, and interior landscapes we are exposed to the physical experience of being in one’s self at an almost cellular level.

“I paint intuitively, making fast decisions just ahead of allowing any conscious narrative to dictate. I’ve learnt my process invariably leads to a kind of enigmatic self-portrait making. The resulting work is at root my desire to render as authentically as possible what it is to be me; a human - in a house of blood and bones with its internal light show of chemicals firing chaotic highs and lows.”

COCo MORRIS 

Coco’s work is about the practice of painting, it explores colour-form relationships and the tensions and boundaries that exist between different painting languages and genres. This means the subject matter, style of painting, point of inspiration and the process can be quite different between each painting.

Anything goes – The paintings can be improvised and experimental or thoroughly planned out. They move between styles and subject matter. Despite the variation in approaches the works do have reoccurring compositions and motifs that are echoed across Coco’s practice. All of the paintings emerge and are resolved through the action of painting. The works occupy a space where opposing narratives sit together; abstraction and figuration, minimalist and abstract expressionist references, planned and experimental. Scale, subject matters, colours and the emotional tone of the works are different which presents curatorial contrasts and connections across paintings.

Compositionally the paintings are balanced – but ever so slightly off – awkward shapes don’t line up, as if the image has been agitated. The colour/form relationships are at times bold, using opaque and clashing colours, but they can also be very subtle as light and surface come into play. A single colour might be applied in a wash to create different tones and luminosity, or used impasto to give saturation and body. They interact to create visual sensations; optical illusions of backlit and absent colours and vibrating edges. Layers and textures create painterly depth and a sense of weight giving these paintings a tactile quality with the hand of the artist evident across all the works.