2015    the four corners of the world plus one ….    the stour gallery

foreword    dr ryya bread

A formula has been drawn up… a framework for her to work within. She has made a line around herself and the world…
The four corners of the world plus one…’plus one’ because you can never get it all in the initial framework… there is always the exception…The anomaly here is case and point.

She told me about this framework months ago… for months I have watched it being filled in – like a school girl with a colouring book both in the tedious classroom and out on a glorious field trip. She has spent her time painting the canvases she laid out to complete. She has made explicit an inherent part of her professional practice – of setting about the business of producing a body of work…

How does she approach the task? She makes a structure to rein in a seemingly infinite amount of possibilities… in order to focus on a few of them and actually manifest them into paintings… and a show.

She has told me the framework many times, patiently going over it… excitedly expounding about it, fearfully fretting through it and blazingly triumphing over it… and yet I struggle simply to remember it.

Here I am now… at the thin end of the line… on the wire as it were… and I am clumsily trying to fit the puzzle pieces together – to remember the order, the categories – was it 5 canvases in four corners plus one? Or four canvases in 5 corners – were the chairs in the first corner or the last – are the houses in the plus one or the fourth? See how I run…?

But it doesn’t matter really – make of it what you will.The framework is a convention.A hanger to display the garment… the garment is her artful offering – the canvases themselves – the paint, the patience, the insight, the wit, the humour… it is all there in the paintings to see.

She can make as many categories as she likes – she can fill as many corners as it takes… underlying the garment of canvases, lies the body of her work – the substance of it all: her own being in this world and the mission to take meaning from it, to make meaning of it; and in so doing… becoming more and more the painter that she already is… painting herself a world that she wants to live in and inviting us to take tea with her there amidst the flowers and the fruit…in a house of our own design… with a love bigger than the world we know already and as big as our imagination can stretch the everyday things that surround us.

She shows us, through this body of work, what a wonderful world this can be when it is illuminated by simple acknowledgement and sheer conviction of the mark that this makes. She invites us to wear it, to live it and to see art in every corner of our world, plus hers.