Room to Move :: Kathryn Dolby
5 Dec 2015 - 30 Jan 2016
Gallery Upstairs
Room to Move is an exhibition that traces my year outside of the university setting. A year of geographical change and personal growth, and one where I have wanted to strip back to the basis of intuitive, creative impulse and experiential reflection, with a focus on the development of my painting practice.
These paintings have become a visual articulation of the emotional and sensory experiences felt during this time of transition and change – of moving physically and mentally into unfamiliar terrain and the simultaneous desire and fear that accompanies such movement.
This sense of movement, space and capturing transitional states has become an underlying aesthetic and thematic interest in my evolving practice. The recurrence of drawing from these sensations has become an intuitive pull. I tease at a sense of these states through a layering process of paint application and removal, where the works arrive at an ambiguous place of simultaneously becoming and disappearing. .
Such simple experiential reference points are harnessed from a desire to draw from honest human experience of place and space. These references then filter into the works and are transformed through the physical act of creation. The works become a conversation between yourself and the materials and each piece takes on a life of its own, where mind, memory and materials mingle.
Room to Move stems from a literal and metaphorical time of transition in my life, as a graduate catapulting out of university into a new geographical landscape and the desire for time and space to grow as an individual and an artist.