Liminal Encounters. Jeremy Houghton

About

The people and objects that characterize these scenes are illuminated by the way that he shapes the spaces between things, and the spaces in which bodies linger, shimmer, move and often take flight.

"Liminal is rather a poetic word that describes the state of being inbetween and is very pertinent to my work. When I am painting in a residency I try and position myself on the threshold between the perception and reality, visually recording scenes that are usually behind closed doors. Ever since I was small I have been interested in painting and focusing on the negative spaces between objects. The paintings that I will show at Gallery 8 will be a combination of work that I have done on my residencies, along with the uplifting studies of birds in flight. To see more of these go to www.jeremyhoughton.co.uk."

Jeremy Houghton is hosting a private viewing on Thursday 22 October for guests of UCL Cancer Institute Research Trust and 25% of all art sold on the night will be donated to  fund their lifesaving cancer research in the heart of London. If you want to purchase a piece of art and help fund cancer research, please email charlotte.a.taylor@ucl.ac.uk or call 020 7679 6325 to request an invitation.

After training at the Slade School of Art and the University of Provence, Jeremy Houghton's formative years as an artist were spent in South Africa as Head of Fine Art at The International School of Cape Town. On returning to England, and the village of his childhood - Broadway, he set up a studio and fully devoted himself to evolving a personal aesthetic.

Houghton paints the atmosphere and essence of specific places, focusing on their spatial and temporal liminality. The people and objects that characterize these scenes are illuminated by the way that he shapes the spaces between things, and the spaces in which bodies linger, shimmer, move and often take flight.

A broad variety of adventures and experiences have shaped an artistic development that has been chronicled through a rich context of specific commissions, international exhibitions and residencies. The many prestigious residencies have taken him into close proximity with the sources of his work, enabling him to witness important events, and draw on the immediacy and vibrancy of places to provide images that energize his narrative. He was an official artist for London Fashion Week in 2008 and the Olympics in 2012; artist in residence at Highgrove in 2013, at Windsor Castle in 2014, and at Goodwood in 2015.

Paintings made in his Broadway studio embrace the natural world at full tilt and further a personal theme of dynamic motion. Sparked by remembered experiences and a more imaginary approach, they often explore the spaces and actions of birds congregating and migrating, edging the liquidity of oil paint or watercolour, to processes which encourage his pictures to float in and out of abstraction.

These two distinct and yet complimentary bodies of work have been exhibited together in recent solo exhibitions at The Saatchi Gallery (London), The Everard Read Gallery (Johannesburg), The Visual Arts Gallery (Delhi), and The Ashmolean Museum, Broadway.

In experiencing all his paintings as a journey, our senses are richly stimulated: sensual colour or contrasting tonal relationships lead us to discover visual pathways; imagery leads us to anticipate memories; forms and movement are implied by the play of light and shade; objects seem to coalesce or evaporate before our eyes.

Favoured themes of time, motion, transience and change are further developed in sculptural arrangements and installations that explore movement in relation to our physical experience of objects in space. In these bodies of work, the artist works with an increasingly dematerialised version of object forms, channelling natural effects of light and reflection, changing conditions, and illusory space to enliven and inform our experience and impression of the world.