Lily Stockman: A Green Place

About

Somewhere along the vertical axis of most of Lily Stockman’s paintings lies the suggestion of a dividing line, if not some length of a line itself. This makes a painting’s two sides roughly symmetrical. Look, for instance, at the mottled chartreuse patch left by the spring of a lifted brush at one top corner of Planting Out (all works 2022) compared to the smooth sweeping stroke on the other side. Some lines wobble; others crook slightly, like the crimson interior frame of Mouth of Burns Canyon. These are the variations that undergird nature’s geometries as well as anything made by human hands. No leaf is perfectly symmetrical. Fold one and see. We are left to ask: is Stockman’s hermeneutic one of doubling (two things likened for similarity) or of opposition (two things likened for contrast)? Or, perhaps it is something different altogether that opens onto her oeuvre as a whole—something that eschews the binary logic of opposition and models the capacity to hold together difference. Something that, in acknowledging this difference, allows us to linger in a place of wonder, the way we might at the sight of frozen tendrils reaching over a lake’s surface or the camouflage of a caterpillar against a stem. This place of wonder is Stockman’s A Green Place, a title taken from the journal of Derek Jarman, who let sea kale and lavender cotton thrive where the biting winds swept their seeds, forging a boundaryless garden on the Dungeness coast.