Pippa Blake's first solo exhibition with Wyer Gallery features a new series of abstract paintings.   Blake's work, primarily inspired by the landscape, contains imagery mediated through the filters of her own memory and experience alongside the influence of different poetry and prose.   Aware of a traditional language of abstraction, her work seeks to transcend fixed limitations and abstract elements seem to hover on the edge of representation as, teasingly suggestive of narrative, largely hidden shapes and drawn motifs hint at apocalyptic content but are overlapped with fluid gestural strokes, erratically drawn scratches, striations and other mark making.  

In her larger, square canvases, planes of foreground colour float in front of, and stretch behind, ambiguous mid and background detail, compelling the eye to oscillate disconcertingly between shifting points of focus whose interplay suggests the resurfacing of something just beyond our grasp.   The impossibility of these psychological spaces opposes the stark physicality of the paintings' surface.   Thickly sculpted, these works seem concerned above all with the evidence of their own materiality.   Confining herself to a narrow range of dark reds, orange and browns, Blake enjoys the nuances of a limited palette whilst focusing on the physical possibilities of paint:  

"With no horizontal emphasis, these paintings draw the spectator into something more like a Baroque space, whose churning depths disorient the viewer as he is drawn into the dimly lit gaping voids. The paintings take on the appearance of religious pictures devoid of explicit content - so that the spectator stands in awe of the space and light that create ineffable forms. Whilst the scale calls for a cinematic response, the working of the surface confirms the picture as an object. The activity of making the painting establishes the correct response to the picture as an object of still contemplation". Winters, Ed, Pippa Blake - New Paintings, June 2007

Pippa Blake graduated from West Dean College in 2005 and before that Camberwell School of Art.   She has shown nationally and internationally in group and solo shows.   Her most recent projects have included a residency on board RRS Discovery, voyaging between Newfoundland, Greenland and Iceland.

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