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Michael Phillipson
My practice returns unavoidably to and circles around the intertwining of ‘place’ and ‘work’.
In my current ‘threshold’ series (they are not exactly paintings...) the title points primarily to the invisible zone or line to be crossed in entering/leaving the place of work - the studio, passing across this line marks for me the strangest of transitions. The primary material (wood ash) that I am using effects a specific connection with place, being the residue and a recycling of trees that I am growing and replacing in the landscape surrounding the studio. On the way to dispersal and disappearance, ash is insubstantial, delicate, and resists attempts to hold it down. For me the receding entrances, half-fixed on the surface, floating in an ashen no-space, are similarly unplaceable. The image also owes something to the Japanese ‘tori-i’ - the gate within no walls marking the entrance to wayside Shinto shrines.
Abstraction hovers in the paintings, sometimes dissolving into a bird or a leaf or an insect; but these are always there anyway in the genesis of the painting, and it is the addition of light, movement, atmosphere to these elements which occasionally removes that immediate recognition onto another plane.
My practice returns unavoidably to and circles around the intertwining of ‘place’ and ‘work’.
In my current ‘threshold’ series (they are not exactly paintings...) the title points primarily to the invisible zone or line to be crossed in entering/leaving the place of work - the studio, passing across this line marks for me the strangest of transitions. The primary material (wood ash) that I am using effects a specific connection with place, being the residue and a recycling of trees that I am growing and replacing in the landscape surrounding the studio. On the way to dispersal and disappearance, ash is insubstantial, delicate, and resists attempts to hold it down. For me the receding entrances, half-fixed on the surface, floating in an ashen no-space, are similarly unplaceable. The image also owes something to the Japanese ‘tori-i’ - the gate within no walls marking the entrance to wayside Shinto shrines.
Abstraction hovers in the paintings, sometimes dissolving into a bird or a leaf or an insect; but these are always there anyway in the genesis of the painting, and it is the addition of light, movement, atmosphere to these elements which occasionally removes that immediate recognition onto another plane.
 Terminal Gardening 1) Noon 2) Dusk. Woodash, leaves, medium, on wood panels. 44.5cm x 84.5cm x 4cm |
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 Eroding Penninsula, oil on canvas, h50cm x w60cm, £500 |