‘Of Mere Being’
Pippa Gatty
17 March - 8 April 2023
Pippa’s studio is hidden on the tip of the Isle of Mull, off the main road and down a track that leads through the folkloric sounding ‘felled forest’, and yet further on still until you reach the sea. Nestled on the northern point of the island, almost nothing stands between it and the North Atlantic Ocean and (eventually) America. The essence of the paintings in ‘Of Mere Being’ can be found in this remote and wild spot.
The exhibition borrows its title from the eponymous Wallace Stevens poem which he wrote towards the end of his life. In it, Stevens uses nature as a metaphor to illustrate the dualism of an embodied, physical human experience and metaphysics (another form of existence, unreachable through any study of material reality.) Much like Pippa’s paintings, his poetry is abstract and, as with his subject, often difficult to comprehend. Having been particularly inspired by this poem and also drawing on the Sublime tradition of the eighteenth-century, Pippa reflects on similar themes: on the one hand revealing a rural life lived in close harmony with the natural world, on the other, demonstrating a recognition of it’s power, capable of inducing, as Edmund Burke wrote, ‘ideas of pain and danger…and the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.’ ‘Of Mere Being’ presents a collection of landscapes which consider the entwined and often fractious relationship between humans an an ‘offended nature,’ Pippa’s wonder (and often fear) of her wild surroundings as well as the connection between our physical body and an ineffable cosmic presence.
One doesn’t need to visit Mull to feel the potent sense of place that is so characteristic of Pippa’s paintings. Her expressive brushstrokes conjure its ferocious extremity and, much like the unpredictable weather of the Hebrides, even in the cool blue or gold of tranquil moments, the storminess conjured by dark swirling tones is never far away. Less tangibly perhaps, Pippa’s immersion in a wild terrain seems to affect her practice too, recalling the way elements might shape landscapes. Her smaller irregularly shaped works are almost the right size to fit in the palm of a hand and, in her search for an image, amongst the scraping and sanding, they bring to mind the motion of the sea, wearing away at fragments of rock until they’re pocked and pattered and smooth. In the quest to ‘hang on to an image,’ there is a wild vitality to her practice which, in order to find an image, she must attempt to tame.
Surpassing the immediately discernible subject of Pippa’s paintings is an existentialism far larger than their physical scale. Howard Hodgkin once said, in riposte to a question about whether he considered himself to be an abstract painter, that he was, ‘a realist painter of the emotions.’ In Of Mere Being, Pippa paints, the arcane and ineffable realistically, encoding obscurity into her very style. She seeks not to explain but to portray something of an experience of the world. With dark frame-like devices that border many of her paintings , the viewer peers through stormy chasms, almost like the mire of existence, to a revelatory lightness beyond or, as Stevens put it, ‘the palm at the end of the mind.’
