Interview with Joy Gerrard

23/03/19

Interview with Joy Gerrard

Protest and Remembrance
Miriam de Búrca | Joy Gerrard | Mary Griffiths | Barbara Walker
Alan Cristea Gallery, London
28 February – 30 March 2019

Working with hand-ground Japanese ink, Joy Gerrard (b1971, Dublin) makes small drawings and large canvases depicting bird’s-eye views of mass protests, here specifically anti-Brexit and anti-Trump marches from June 2018. Consciously working from media images – primarily stills from helicopter footage – which she collects in their hundreds, Gerrard selects those images that she will turn into her monochrome drawings, getting to know the image and memorialising it in the process. From these, she then may select a couple to work up into a large canvas – using the same medium, but to very different, almost abstract effect. This time, she works from the drawing, concentrating on areas of tone and shade, creating a strong composition, built up in small sections. Overall, her aim is to make visible the masses who attend these protests, which she strongly believes canmake a difference. Her work not only takes protest – and remembrance – as its themes, but it is, in itself, a form of protest.

Watch the interview here

Interview with Fabienne Verdier

13/12/16

Interview: Fabienne Verdier

Fabienne Verdier: Rhythms and Reflections 

Waddington Custot

25 November 2016 - 4 February 2017

Fabienne Verdier (b1962, Paris) produces large, abstract paintings, characterised by bold, gestural brushstrokes, made using enormous, suspended vertical brushes of her own construction. She combines knowledge and philosophy, learned during 10 years studying with old masters in China, with western expressionism, to create explosions of movement and life on the carefully prepared, layered canvases. Her physical and performative creative practice experiments with reproducing energy lines – invisible forces that are continually evolving – often echoing, albeit unintentionally, natural forms, such as branches, rivers and lightning flashes.

Verdier’s work has been shown alongside a huge variety of artists, including Auguste Rodin, Willem de Kooning, Ellsworth Kelly, Cy Twombly and the Flemish primitives, but watching Verdier in the act of painting most calls to mind Jackson Pollock with his vertical method of pouring, dripping and swirling the paint, using contraptions such as turkey basters.

In 2014, Verdier was the first visual artist-in-residence at the Juilliard School in New York, where she undertook live studio experiments seeking to answer the question of whether painting and music, in the moment of creation, might be “played” simultaneously. Her works in Rhythms and Reflections, her current exhibition at Waddington Custot, London, derive from this experiment, materialising rhythms and reflections on the canvas. They further explore the movement of the body in space and its encounters with lines of force in the landscape as one walks or strolls about.

Speaking to Studio International at the opening of the exhibition, Verdier was palpably excited about her methods and explorations, and full of creative energy.

Read the interview here