- Venue
- Sassoon Gallery (The)
- Location
The Sassoon Gallery of Peckham, South London, last week hosted the first solo show of printmaker Lucy Bainbridge. White Light presented an engaging look at the brevity and fluidity of the contemporary landscape.
Upon entering the gallery, which occupies a railway arch, one became immediately aware of how well married the work was to the space. The bowing walls provided a sympathetic and provoking platform from which to contemplate the works, which were concerned with the perceptions of architectural structures.
Bainbridge is engaged with the exploration of removing definition from an image to the point at which the content and context lose clarity. This recent body of work originated from details of cityscapes reflected within architectural structures, resulting in a combination of organic and formal shapes. A variety of filtering techniques were used by the artist to strip away familiar visual cues, thus leaving space for the viewer to interpret the illusory depiction of the original subject matter that remains.
Occupying a gallery wall each, two large-scale images presented recognisable, yet somewhat estranged images of the London skyline. Despite their scale, these works were unimposing and modest. White gloss paint had been screen printed onto panels of newsprint, which were directly pasted onto the gallery walls. A momentary landscape was effectively paused. The white-on-white heightened the ambiguity of the positive/negative imagery, as did the reflective quality of the gloss paint. Unframed and unprecious, these pieces gave a true sense of the instantaneity of the cityscape.
Standing in contrast to the large-scale images, four framed works demonstrated an elegant precision that was striking. Thick, white card had been embossed with the fluid patterns of mirrored cityscapes. These works had undergone the same creative process as copperplate etchings, save for the fact that no ink was used. This ghostly process created a subtle dimension that relied upon light and shadow to reveal the definition of the image. The contours became architectural structures within their own right before one could consider mapping these illusory forms into more definite ideas.
The works on show in White Light deftly questioned the nature of perception, and in so doing, subtly and coherently articulated the nature of perception.
MA Aesthetics and Art Theory
