Tessa Coe: More Is Everything

About

Tessa’s early life was, thanks to her father, very academic. It was also, thanks to her Italian mother, vibrant and visual. Tessa has a degree and a PhD in Physics from Imperial College in London, and she has been drawing and painting from the heart all her life.

“I like to start my work from some of the complicated areas of life that we take completely for granted; such as the way a storm system develops or our immune system saves our lives, or the food chain within an ocean remains in balance. These are complex systems that scoop up energy and manage their own affairs. Strangely, when looked at through the abstraction of science, these complex systems have aspects in common. Science reveals that it is because these systems are so huge and involve so many elements, they have the ability to develop and sustain themselves. All this without script or instruction”

Within her painting practice, Tessa tries to delve into these complex spaces and with colour and pattern, to express her wonder at their complexity, flexibility and robustness. Life is complex; both robust and fragile, both constant and ever changing. But it is that same fragility that allows a complex system to be flexible and robust, that also enables the ultimate possibility of destructive change or indeed death.

Each canvas is just a glimpse of some larger whole. But just where we are, in that square glimpse, something new and vigorous is occurring. The outcome is not settled once and for all; there are routes away from where we are. But just for now, the glimpse is of possibilities unfolding.