GILL ORD 'Companions and Furrows'

About

'...Gill Ord’s work is committed to a restless curiosity. I am often most drawn to it because I don’t know what it is I’m looking at, so trying to hold it steady enough to write something down is at once tantalising and frustrating. Her paintings and drawings have a resistance about them. There’s some repetition and geometry, some scaffolding that we might hold onto but it doesn’t really stand up; there’s near imagery we might recognise but it remains just that – near, but not here.

‘Light in painting’, a phrase she has used that connotes a coming to light, in her hands becomes a twilight that might give way to murkiness as much as illumination: to Goethe’s yellow sun or the slippery mud of its easy contamination. These paintings, like much of Ord’s work, come from trying to hold on to something by looking for the light. There is lightness here as well, of the kind that Italo Calvino speaks of in one of his 6 Memos for the Next Millenium, where knowledge of something dissolves its solidity, leading to a perception of the infinitely minute, light and mobile; this yellow mist, these shadow...'
A catalogue will be available with an essay (extract above) by Tom Chamberlain