In My Secret Life

About

Kimberley Golding’s recent series of paintings, In My Secret Life, are part of her wider desire to excavate and modify her environment in the pursuit of beauty. Throughout her career – which has also encompassed fashion and interiors – the London-born artist continues to engage with an ongoing conversation about beauty: how it manifests itself in its most refined forms, and the mathematical and cosmological structures that underpin its expression.  

Reflecting on her process, Golding says, “It's trying to find something that already exists without me knowing about it; trying to tap into something beautiful that is already there in a philosophical way – the ideal measurement, the ideal colors, the ideal balance. It's an exercise in trying to access that beauty. It already exists, it’s just a matter of rearranging things until I find it. That's what I believe and that's how I feel about trying to make beautiful paintings.” 

Striking for their vibrant colours, the series takes inspiration from her youth and the interior of her childhood bedroom, which was decorated in “the most archetypal 1980s decor, with yellow, red and blue dashes on the wallpaper”. These “juicy colours” evoke the innocence of her earliest forays into painting. “I’m really drawn to and inspired by trying to balance the colours together, trying to keep them in the right quantities.” The ‘right’ quantities and configurations being about achieving consonance between disparate elements on the canvas. “If anything, it feels like the opposite of uncanny,” she explains, reflecting on the harmonious sensation she is trying to distill in each artwork. 

“Harmony is literally the word,” she explains, “because that’s what harmony is – a mathematical formula, a particular ratio that occurs in nature. So, thinking about what I mean by the concept of ‘harmony’, I’d say it's natural, it's nature. I'm trying to paint something that – even though it's come out of my head and the colors aren't colours we would necessarily see together, or at all, in the natural world – I’m trying to create something that feels natural because it gives me a sensation of harmony that exists so the natural world.”

Rather than making figurative paintings which rely on the overworked visual cues suggesting beauty – sunsets, flowers and traditional nudes ectetera – Golding strives to make work that is in of itself an object of beauty. “I'm trying to find this balance, this harmony in my abstract paintings, that makes me feel that it's beautiful without literally painting an object that we would recognise as beautiful. I‘m trying to make something that is beautiful rather than depict something that signifies beauty.”

In My Secret Life looks beyond the apparent chaos or randomness of nature to the science and order that actually governs it. Golding takes much inspiration from medical text books and their anatomical diagrams, as well as concepts in quantum physics and mathematics. “I’m interested in cells and particles which are smaller than our naked eye can see, as well as the interiors of our bodies, which we rarely see,” she says. “I'm not trying to literally paint them but, even though it’s not a realistic painting, I feel we recongnise these forms as shapes which could exist in nature.”

On display in Klein House – Golding’s home studio – the paintings, hung together, feel like they create their own kind of ecosystem. “My living room is full of my own paintings and a lot of colours. Some people might come into the room and feel, ‘Oh my God, it's too full. It's so many colors, I can't rest my eyes.’ But, to me, when I've got it right – when I’m happy with the paintings – it gives me the same feeling as if I were surrounded by plants. Even though they’re bright and arresting, there is a feeling of calmness for me that I might equate with the sensation of being in a jungle. There’s so much going on around you – birdsong, trees, flowers – but it’s not overwhelming because it’s all natural. That's what I'm trying to recreate by being surrounded by this series of paintings.The more of them I put together, the more it gives me that harmonious feeling of abundant nature.”

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