Beyond Reason
Judith North & Kate Proudman
26 April -14 May 2023
Meet the Artists: Sat 13 May 2.30pm
A chance to view the work, enjoy a glass of wine and ask any questions in an informal setting. All welcome.
Beyond Reason introduces a new series of oil paintings, watercolour sketches and 3D work by Judith North and Kate Proudman.
The work of these two artists gives us an insight into their shared processes. Evidence of the frequent removal, reapplying and layering of paint implies an attitude to process which centres on a sense of time passing. Their work shows energy of time and process. Common between the artists is an engagement with the subject that is often veiled or intentionally ambiguous.
Both artists work through a non-literal approach. Kate Proudman starts with a written description of an unknown space, and through various abstract processes, seeks to express the unknown information beyond that which is described in the text. Similarly, Judith North creates abstract paintings inspired by everyday experiences, drawing from memories from her subconscious rather than directly representing physical objects or scenes. Both artists use their intuition and the painting process itself to bring forth their ideas, inviting the viewer to engage with their work through imagination and contemplation rather than through a literal interpretation.
Judith approaches her work instinctively. By dislocating herself from her conscious thoughts, she aims to allow her paintings to take on a life of their own. In her work, traces of forms play under the surface, but only obliquely, as if from the subconscious. Although she draws on her own remembered images and emotions, there is no reliance on figurative painting to communicate concept; she works methodically with control building up overlapping layers and intersections alluding to the experience of recollecting. Like thought processes, areas are sometimes overworked and knotty and sometimes empty and vague, the works rely on a considered understanding of paint and colour.
Conversely, Kate uses paint as a metaphor for her understanding of text, often working on pieces for several years, struggling back and forth with space and form, through dissecting, removing, re-constructing and shifting elements until a new space is revealed a long distance from its inception. The work begins from the moment that Kate begins to decode her meaning from the text which could have so many different meanings. This conjecturing enables her choice of elements to be retained, which details to bring out or which to reject, and the distortions to creep in, according to her reading. These are not due to chance but are the result of Kate’s choice of what to remember or what to explain, in a sense her revised version of the text, her imagined reality.
About the Artists:
Judith North (born Bristol, England) lives and works in South West London. She studied Fine Art at the Sir John Cass School of Art, London Metropolitan University having originally studied Mathematics and Art History at London University.
Kate is an architect and artist. She studied architecture at Bristol and Edinburgh Universities, and Fine Art at London Met. She lives and works in London, and co-founded One Paved Court in 2017. Kate had solo shows at the Fairfax Gallery, Oxford University Press, in 2015 and 2017. and showed Lily Briscoe’s painting at Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press, Riverside Gallery, 2016.
Recent joint shows include Lockdown Letters to Horace, Strawberry Hill House, Oct 2020, and Seeing Sense, a 2-person show at One Paved Court, Feb 2020.
