Ione Parkin RWA

PRESS RELEASE
Solo show at Gomez Gallery, Baltimore USA, April 1998

IONE PARKIN - ABSTRACT LANDSCAPES

Ione Parkin’s paintings invite the viewer into frontier territory.  Her exploration of the “borderland between abstraction and representation” (1) leads us into visually dramatic and often demanding terrain.  Her work conveys immense vitality in the treatment of colour, form and line that keeps the viewer optically, emotionally and intellectually in motion.  Fundamentally, she aims to evoke “a sense of aliveness and energy - the energy of growth within nature” (2).  These are exciting and provocative images with strong visual and visceral impact. 

Parkin’s paintings are rooted in her personal experience of landscape.  She seeks to translate into paint the elemental and varied sensations she experiences in the natural world.  These sensations vary from the fearful to the spiritual, from the lyrical to the feral.  Parkin’s view of landscape is broad and inclusive.  She takes it to embrace “weather, the force of sap rising, the textural contrasts involved in the experience of nature, the elemental and geological activity” (3).  One senses immediately that a huge amount of emotive energy goes into the creation of these paintings.

Parkin is continuing to evolve her perception of and abstraction from the landscape for new painterly ends, in particular to investigate bolder compositional solutions and to enrich her rendering of organic forms.  Her “seemingly abstract paintings convey the mass of tangled growth and hidden perspectives” (4) associated with dense forest interiors.  Recently, she has shifted her attention to more specific organic forms that are incorporated within the landscape and in her treatment of such forms she is further exploring issues of scale and perspective.

Many of Parkin’s works convey an intensity and complexity of feeling that can be ultimately satisfying or ultimately confusing for a viewer, depending on the viewer’s own mindset and staying power.  But though some paintings “can be restless images, … they are finely controlled and carefully structured” (4).  In some works, deliberate spatial ambiguity and disorientation encourage us not to arrive at a premature ‘black and white’ solution in our response to them.  Parkin’s paintings require us to separate the process of perception into the discrete stages of watching, seeing and comprehending, moving ever deeper in an iterative cycle of engagement.

Parkin does provide us with some navigational aids for our interpretative journey.  In any particular work there is usually an “entry zone of believable space” (2) in which to secure a perceptual foothold and from which further progress can be made.  At the same time, her handling of paint, whether applied in broad swathes, specific coagulations or fine tracings, deliberately provokes the viewer to confront her mark-making purely as paint.  In this way, in reading a particular work, we oscillate between the illusion of invented space and the palpable reality of painted marks.  “Within this process of looking in two different ways, one begins to weave a relationship and connection so that ultimately one’s experience of the painting spans this divide.  Eventually one has to confront it for what it is - a painting - and it creates a new reality” (5).

In translating her vision of landscape, Parkin’s work involves her in a very tactile exploration of the painting medium.  Parkin says of her work, “these are process-driven paintings, where forms are created organically from an accumulation of marks and are generated within the medium itself. The paint is manipulated - wiped, scraped and sculpted into a life of its own.  The marks form an animated web of planes and subliminal verticals, revealing the underlying structure of landscape.  These calligraphic marks are not random - they are like a seismograph, indicating minute changes and embedded internal frictions.  In this way their resonance with the landscape runs deep” (1).

Parkin’s approach is essentially intuitive and instinctive.  There is a gestural immediacy in her brushwork that contributes directly to the flow of energy and vitality within her paintings.  In her treatment of space, form and line there are echoes of the Zen Buddhist approach of zui hitsu, or ‘following the brush’.  In her approach and technique, Parkin challenges us to be more than passive observers and to engage in active investigation of the painted surface.  Her works bear and reward repeated visitation.

 

David Metcalfe
April 1998

 

(1)  Artist’s statement, April 1997.
(2)  Artist’s notebook, January 1998.
(3)  Artist’s notebook, April 1997.
(4)  ‘3 Years On’, Art First, London 1997, p.36.
(5)  Artist’s notebook, February 1998.