Wolfson College Oxford
Exhibition Statement
[..} the incidental, the transitory, the peripheral – that aspect of our experience that is both there and not there, the object and not the object of our sensations, perceived but seldom attended to. These transparent phantoms disappeared into their envionments, and yet, upon occasion, almost at the corner of our eye, there they seemed to shiver – a gleam*
Painting and drawing form the main part of my practice through which I investigate the memory and experience of walking though urban space, sound, rhythm and time. The paintings record this enquiry and contain many concealed layers of interaction, decision making, surface tension and resolution.
Research of Brutalist architecture and early Italian Renaissance painting provide abstract entry spaces for me to begin this process. The paintings despite their geometric elements are not planned in advance but are made intuitively by responding, with colour and line. Surface incidents and accidents are retained as a witness to the progression, as is the history of colour slippage on the stretcher edge.
Marion Piper June 2011
*Lawrence Weschler, biography of Robert Irwin,
Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, University of California Press, 2008
