Selected paintings from various earlier projects
Lacuna. Oil on canvas. 100 x 150 cm
Green Earth. Oil on canvas. 100 x 150 cm
October. Acrylic on canvas
Composure. Oil on canvas. SOLD
Mettle. Acrylic on canvas. SOLD
Field Of Vision
Solo show at 35 North Gallery, 2017
Paintings in this exhibition were developed out of trips to East Anglia, where Michelle grew up, a place of vast skies and flat landscapes. For her, the desolate and barren terrain signifies familiarity, calm and emptiness, whilst also tapping into her adult sene of displacement from the region.
Through the creative process there is a recovery and a contriving of what has been lost but not forgotten. She revisions something from memory and builds upon it, shaping the past into something new. Implicit here is nostalgia as affective experience: A going back to something good only to find it wanting. Paradoxically, through the act of remembering, something novel can be created.
Drawing upon her study of Visual Culture she deliberately locates her work in the pared down abstract genre. The paintings develop out of layers and repetition as she delves into the relationship between scale and colour, the contrasts between quietness and intensity, and the shifting borderlines between vigour and serenity.
Michelle displays an instinct for disclosing how outward appearances are not the whole story. Always she is aiming to create a balance of harmony that resolves the work. Meantime, perhaps there is some small victory over transience, which allows a forward stride and the carving of a new pathway.
— Text by Michelle Cobbin & Richard Gilpin