Biography
Ione Parkin is a painter and printmaker and has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. She was born in Oxfordshire in 1965. She studied at Winchester School of Art, graduating in 1988 with a BA Hons in Fine Art. Parkin is an elected member of the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) and lives in Bath, UK.
Copper Mountain 110 x 130 cm, Oil and synthetic resin on canvas, Gallery Price - £2500
Parkin is deeply interested in geology and the natural environment and her paintings reflect this with tactile virtuosity. Her work is informed by extensive travel – from glaciers to volcanic terrain, from mountain ranges to limestone plateaux and from jungles to caves. The experience of this varied stimuli, recorded through drawing, photography and intense observation, forms and nourishes the fertile matrix of memory. She draws on this internal reservoir of remembered senses to create a language entirely her own. Parkin’s work vibrates with a sense of the expansive, the eternal – an expression of the unity of rhythm and motion that exists at microscopic and macroscopic levels. Her language is instinctual, her vision, unique.
Solo shows include Art First, London, UK and Gomez Gallery, Baltimore, U.S.A. 2-person shows include Adam Gallery, Bath and London, UK (with Fred Cuming RA) and Earth-Skin, Black Swan Guild, Somerset (with Peter Hayes, international ceramicist/sculptor). Group shows include Northcote Gallery, Chelsea, London, and Rosenberg & Kaufman, New York.
The artist says of her work:
“My work is concerned with the elemental processes of landscape. I combine an intuitive and tactile exploration of the physicality of the painting medium with a response to natural phenomena, the forces of geological activity and the development of organic form… Each painting becomes like a fossil-bearing surface, revealing tracks and traces … The work eventually sets into its new-found form, freeze-framed in time and motion. This is a point of unstable equilibrium where the contrasting states of resolution and quest co-exist.
The paintings function as a microcosm – a finely balanced and sustainable system where each of the complex variety of marks makes a vital and unique contribution to the success of the whole. A state of fragile stability is achieved between clarity and diffusion, between the relative densities of substance and space, between structure and chaos.”