CATALOGUE ESSAY written by HAMISH SAWYER for 'AMONGST' 2021
Bridie Gillman spent part of her childhood in Jakarta and has regularly returned to Indonesia over the past decade to exhibit, undertake residencies and produce work. The artist has made several trips to Yogyakarta (or Jogja) in particular, known as the country’s cultural capital and home to many of its leading contemporary artists. The city’s old town, with its unique mix of traditional Javanese and colonial Dutch architecture, bustling laneways and lack of high-rise buildings stands in marked contrast to the heavily urbanized capital. Life happens there largely at street level.
On previous visits to Jogja, Gillman has documented her wanderings around the old town, taking photographs of quotidian details that catch her eye: bright blue plastic chairs at an outdoor café; an orange water bucket in front of a concrete wall covered in lurid graffiti; an emerald green quilt drying in the sunshine. What unites their seemingly disparate content is Gillman’s nuanced appreciation of colour. These images form the source material for the artist’s new exhibition of paintings and ceramics, entitled Amongst.
Gillman’s abstract paintings are perhaps best described as colour studies that evoke memories of a particular place or object for the artist. The artist carefully selects images from her digital archive to work from. Rather than trying to recreate them in a figurative style however, she has developed her own vocabulary of abstract forms and colour:
“These remembered experiences are translated through layers of colour and considered brushstrokes, building an emotional sense of this place, rather than a purely visual representation of the site”. (1)
It is often a single detail from the source image, such as a ceramic tile or a watering can, which informs the spectrum of colour Gillman will use on a particular canvas. Shoes off, cold tiles underfoot 2021 is dominated by not one, but multiple shades of green, from chartreuse to cyan and every tone in between. Some stray sections of midnight blue and burgundy are also visible but the painting is essentially a composition of contrasting, and sometimes competing, passages of green.
The colour palette is the only predetermined part of Gillman’s otherwise intuitive process. The artist works on clear-primed linen, using diluted pigment to create atmospheric washes, gradually building up to more robust layers of oil paint. Waiting 2021 is made up of blue, green and pink segments of varying intensity and size. These individual parts are in turn made up of vertical and horizontal brushstrokes that have become a trademark of Gillman’s oeuvre. The viewer’s eye is led around the canvas by the painterly gestures, which, combined with glimpses of bare canvas, assert the work’s materiality.
It is impossible to look at these paintings without thinking about the legacy of abstract expressionism. They were remnants from a local factory 2021, with its murky palette of olive green, duck-egg blue, grey and flesh pink is reminiscent of Willem de Kooning’s famed Women series. A more relevant comparison however, might be Helen Frankenthaler’s masterpiece Flood 1967, from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In it, Frankenthaler manipulates thinned oil paint across the canvas to merely suggest a landscape, rather than representing one.
Gillman is deeply aware of (male) art historical forebears such as de Kooning and their problematic treatment of women; but feels a greater affinity with female painters like Frankenthaler, who received considerably less acknowledgement for their contribution to the trajectory of modernism than their male peers, until decades later:
“I love Frankenthaler's work - the way she abstracts the landscape and her abstracted responses to colour and form in the works of painters like Manet. On….Howard Hodgkin, I particularly liked his Absent Friends exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2017, I guess I'm interested in artists who abstract reality.” (2)
Hodgkin (1932 – 2017) was a gay, male British artist from the generation after de Kooning et al. He was a master colourist, whose abstract compositions drew upon the artist’s own life, yet actively resisted a biographical reading. In Absent Friends 2000-01 (the work which gave the aforementioned exhibition its title), concentric bands of black and brown paint frame a series of flesh-toned stripes, which reveal a sliver of vibrant turquoise at the painting’s core. As well as their sophisticated and unconventional use of colour, Hodgkin’s paintings are characterised by dynamic brushwork that resonates with Gillman’s handling of pigment.
As John Elderfield observed, “Hodgkin’s paintings invite looking at, not looking for.” (3) The same can be said of Gillman’s canvases. Their abstracted content requires the viewer to engage with the work on its merits as a painting; rather than seek to excavate some hidden meaning or message.
For Amongst, Gillman is showing a group of ceramics alongside her paintings, a notable development in her practice. These objects are the result of experimentation and increased time in the studio last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Gillman hand built the forms in clay, loosely basing them on domestic objects found in her photographs from Jogja, including paw-paws, a basket for carrying fruit, pipes and found detritus. The objects were then fired in a kiln, before the artist applied coloured glazes to their surfaces.
Gillman’s ceramics are not facsimiles, nor do they serve any functional purpose as vessels. Instead, they extend the potentialities of colour and abstraction for communicating experiences and emotions connected to place, into a third dimension. The ceramic works represent a new iteration of the artist’s ongoing project allowing the viewer to apprehend her paintings in a more complex and meaningful way.
Notes:
- Bridie Gillman ‘A Space Between Walls’ artist statement, 2020 https://www.bridiegillman.com/a-space-between-wallsaccessed 08/04/21
- Email from the artist to the author, 11/04/21
- Elderfield, John “Passages: Howard Hodgkin” Artforum International, New York, Vol. 56 Iss. 1 (Sept 2017): 93.
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ARTIST STATEMENT — 'Amongst'
My practice is informed by ideas of place, and the ways in which experiences and memories shape our perspective of a site.
Amongst is a reflection on time spent in Yogyakarta over the years. Each painting and sculpture relates to a specific observation or experience of this place. Orange satin billowing roadside; tables and chairs of an empty warung/restaurant; a purple jumper that hung on the line for weeks; and colourful plastic objects, everywhere.
These moments have been distilled in paint through colour and abstract response. As memories of a place often shift over time, with details fading and colours changing, I welcome the distortion that occurs in the process of remembering, and further, in the process of making.
The ceramic sculptures are informed by the same process. Beginning with a specific observed item, the object morphs during the making process. They become an abstracted form based in reality, yet are unconcerned with being representational.
Bridie Gillman, May 2021
