On Time

Tatha Gallery – May/June 2022

Bringing together Delia Baillie, Louise Ritchie and Georgia Rose Murray, On Time presents an exhibition of work from three very different artists who use paint as an elastic medium, with an ability to transcend the maker to inhabit its own materiality and presence.

Theartists gathered originally in 2019 to undertake what was to become, an unexpectedly fruitful project with students of Contemporary Art Practice from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design. Installing one painting each as a temporary group exhibition, it was intended as a catalyst for discussion around the nature of painting. This developed into a deeper significance for the artists themselves. Their shared dialogue around painting, its specific language and formal considerations sit within painting’s capacity to embody diverse ideas, subject matter and approaches.  

Time is often the unspoken element in painting, but it indelibly frames the beginning, middle and the end of any piece. Those temporal moments can exist across minutes, weeks, months and years while the paint holds patiently to the surface and waits until the next glaze is applied or until it is deemed finished. The conversation that the artists hold with their chosen surface is a dialogue between layers of thought, action and response. It employs poetry, observation and imagination as an exchange between maker and surface; accidental connections brought together over time.

What happens when we start to paint? What is the action of lifting a hand, an arm, a body in making a mark and what happens in that moment when the mind and the body acts together in time? For all three artists these questions pose complex considerations which they attempt to answer in different ways over time, yet they all share a profound fascination with paint, and painting.

Tatha Gallery: On Time — May/June 2022

Louise Ritchie: Artist Statement

The canvases for On Time are saturated 2-dimensional compositions that engage with the fundamental language of painting. Line, colour and form are to painting as words, grammar and syntax are to writing. Together these form an indexical process that traces every decision, layer and erasure as a close reading of the entwined fibres and gentle folds within the raw, unstretched canvas. Released from conventional frames, the edges are untethered and free to converse directly with the wall.

The paint travels through the weave, following threads like desire lines through a material landscape or matrix, sometimes taking refuge in watery creases.

There are near imperceptible boundaries between the outer skins of each colour where the surface tension of the water surrounding the pigment tries to resist its neighbour. Eventually it yields, and floods, without persuasion, into the next saturated space, mixing hues as it goes.

These vital poetic spaces, much like words on a page — are where thoughts and ideas collide, form and reform into patterns, order and meaning.