SPECTRUM

About

SPECTRUM: Tom Climent, Darren Coffield, Pippa Gatty, Joshua Huyser, Julie Moss, Iain Nicholls & Alison Pilkington

Tom Climent’s paintings investigate spatial constructs and how they might provide a structured space for our environment. They reference our associations to land and our search and desire to find a place within it. His process is largely intuitive, the act of painting for him starts a process of discovering unintended compositions and relationships, of finding logic and meaning in the unique situation that emerges. Tom received a BA and a Research Masters from the Crawford College of Art & Design in Cork. He has exhibited extensively and his work is in numerous public and private collections. He lives and works in Cork.

Darren Coffield has an interest in the field of human cognition and perception. His work deals with how we perceive and process the world around us and subverts the viewer's instinctive faculties for reading the apparently familiar to create stimulating and provocative paintings. Coffield is currently completing his next book ‘Francis Bacon and The Colony Room Club’ due for publication in 2016. Darren was born and lives in London. He studied painting at Goldsmiths College, Camberwell School of Art and the Slade School of Art. His work is exhibited widely and can be found in collections around the world.

Pippa Gatty’s work is centred on a belief in the power of artistic labour and activity to generate a phantasm. Drawing on a rich history of the sublime and a nostalgia for the golden age of romantic landscape, the paintings suggest an environmental foreboding and a grief for both lost innocence and a vanished world. They are meditations on the human condition, our place within a changing world and the metaphysical possibilities available within this. The work represent a series of melancholic excavations into a lost past and meditations on a potential future. Pippa received her BA and MA from Chelsea School of Art. She has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad and lives and works in Scotland.

Joshua Huyser’s work concentrates on discovering abstract moments in everyday objects and tenderly applies marks that denote and describe, that which moved him, onto the surface he is working with. He is a formalist at heart and his paintings celebrate the translation of three-dimensional objects into two dimensions. Joshua was born and raised in and around Bozeman, Montana. Joshua received his MFA from the University of Iowa in 2001.  He has exhibited internationally, including several solo exhibitions over the past 15 years. He lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Julie Moss looks at the structured landscapes of forests and pools for both the painterly and symbolic possibilities. Using the importance of an experience in the landscape as a motive and subject matter, she is attempting to grasp a line of enquiry into the notion of “Screen Memory” a term used by Sigmund Freud to describe a process that involves a recollection of early childhood that may be falsely recalled or magnified in importance, one that perhaps masks another memory of deep emotional significance. Julie received her BA from Falmouth. She lives and works in Cornwall with regular study trips to the Caribbean.

Iain Nicholls’ paintings are inspired by landscapes, cycle routes and journeys near his home. He works from photographs taken on these journeys and recently his own models based on memories of these landscapes, which purposefully contain sparse information, allowing more space for the imagination once back in the studio, where memory and familiarity also come into play. The painting itself, like an abstract painting, is of equal import as the subject. Iain was born, lives and works in Darfield near Barnsley in South Yorkshire. He studied painting at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art.

Alison Pilkington’s paintings are quasi-figurative with a developing series of personal motifs. Her recent work attempts to play with familiar, yet comic images having the uncanny potential to disturb or disorientate. The paintings are carefully planned through several stages of drawing. The quality of paint handling, although seemingly casual, is a result of repeated attempts at getting something 'right'. Her art practice explores the idea of the psychological self and how this might be manifested through painting. Alison has recently completed a practice led PhD in painting at National College Art and Design Dublin. She lives and works in Dublin.