Five Ten Further Away

Further Away is a group painting exhibition curated by India Dickinson featuring the work of ten contemporary artists. Through painting our world is abstracted. The work featured aims to transport you, to somewhere real or imagined, where the artists are either running to or running from. These ten artists – all from varying backgrounds with different approaches to the medium – are brought together to show a place further away where life is either enhanced or distorted.

The possibilities that painting offers – for instance, in the ability to extract oneself from the here and now to a place that doesn’t exist – is apparent in the work of Ned Armstrong, who uses colour and technique to create an aesthetic that is at once meditative and dynamic. The ethereal figures that appear in Venetia Berry’s paintings float across raw linen surface, her mark making creating a dream-like environment while the exposed canvas acts as a stark reminder of reality.

Daisy Dickinson pushes the conceptual boundaries of painting in her film ‘Blue, But Pale Blue’, which uses microscope footage and dreamlike imagery to take the viewer on a journey through the deepest recesses of one man’s mind. This surrealist short, soundtracked by Grimm Grimm, is Dickinson’s own visual response to her father’s traumatic brain injury. Originally commissioned by With Teeth Fund and produced by London Short Film Festival, the film will be shown as part of this exhibition.

The feelings of displacement and unrest are prominent in Belgian artist Stevie Dix’s expressive paintings, which describe her relocation to London (having lived in Belgium for the past year) and engagement with the current political climate in England. British artist Thom Hobson’s recent body of work has all been created in his home town of Suffolk on an old American air base. Hobson’s painting continue to be influenced by the people and places around him.

Themes of place appear again in the work of Ivo Morrison. Created during a residency in Jamaica and Cuba, his small-scale paintings on view in Further Away were made in situ and depict the people he met and the stories he encountered. Rather than relying on lived experience, Robert Nicol paints imagined worlds on Perspex, juxtaposed throughout with playful characters and unexpected objects. The work appears as folkloric or traditional nursery rhymes but the unconventional composition obscures and distorts the original context and function.

Jack Penny paints social interactions and individuals he has met or imagined. Painting predominately from memory in his studio, the work taps into the artist’s subconscious and fulfils his voyeuristic desires. The adventures of one particular canine character appear in Orfeo Tagiuri’s work, inspired by his brother’s photographs of dogs he sent to Orfeo when in Paris. The work clings to nostalgia, a memento of the past, while capturing the mundanity of the every day.

Stephen Thorpe’s work reveals a meticulous and intensely vivid exploration of inner life as the only true retreat from the stultifying world of form. Vaguely familiar, sometimes humorous and always philosophical, Thorpe’s work offers a window onto a highly personal but culturally situated struggle to escape contemporary existence through the re-enactment of daily life as fantasy.