Robin Dixon and Mandy Hudson
17th September - 21st September 2019
Westminster Reference Library, WC2H 7HP
TABLE OF ELEMENTS
- arrangement of the chemical elements in horizontal layers in order of atomic mass - otherwise difficult to classify in visual terms.
Robin Dixon's paintings are part of a series depicting scientists, technicians and workers involved in different activities or tasks. These he has painted using a combination of found imagery and his own photographs as reference, they are a mixture of the partially observed and the imaginary. The fact that the source material is often of low-grade quality allows him room for interpretation of the subject, which adds to the cryptic and mysterious feel of these scenes. The over-layering of paintings is something that feeds the accidental composition of scenes where elements or perspective of one painting can be re-read in an alternative painting. Buildings, a window, a floor can function as one or other or both, following the paintings own logic. The paintings depiction of internal and external space dissolves the distinction between the room/laboratory and the outside environment/surrounding landscape.
Mandy Hudson's subject matter is found amongst objects she sees around London's streets,in an abandoned shop, in an illuminated room through a window, things arbitrarily or coincidentally arranged. These could be a collection of multi-coloured boxes and packaging stacked for recycling by the roadside, shadows falling across a curtain glimpsed from the street below or a still-life arrangement of fancy goods outside a Pound shop. It is important for her that these are found situations, created without conscious intervention, the randomness of rubbish in it's "natural" state. From these patterns, shapes and structural compositions she can produce a representation, not just of a scene. In editing what she finds, simplifyingor emphasising it's abstract qualities, she finds echoes or intimations of other structures, arrangements or patterns, reminiscent of something on a greater or smaller scale. By removing the temporal from the painting the images become universal or integral.
