SOLO EXHIBITION

ESSAY BY JAMES DODD

Events of recent years hAVE SHOWN US all that we cannot assume the status quo.

Well-laid plans will not always play out as we might have hoped and, at the deeper end of the cliche spectrum - the only thing thing that is certain; is change. From a more affirmative perspective, I would suggest a statement that goes something like - “you have to let go of your old expectations to make room for new possibilities…”

Gina Raisin’s life is not going according to plan. The big dreamy dreams haven’t quite arrived - (they really should have by now). Her art is not going as planned either - (some of these bastard paintings are just not doing what they’re supposed to).

Her mum died. There is a great unravelling at hand.

Death is not something we need to fear - it should not be unexpected. It might be that we could chat with our kids a bit more about death, the end of life and its certainty. We often watch our elderly die slowly, keeping them alive for just that little bit too long. We should know that death is approaching us all, and with it might come peace and rest.

Amongst Gina’s mum’s last belongings, the handful of things that fit in her retirement village wardrobe, were a number of crocheted blankets. As these were moved round they began to undo themselves. The carefully crafted knots were untangling, seeking to be carefully released from their woven home. (At this point- imagine a more comical piece of yarn looking up at Gina and saying, in a squeaky little yarn voice “unpick me Gina! Unpick us all!”). So - Gina sat, and carefully pulled apart all of these blankets. The touch of her hands upon the yarn echoed the touching of her mum had done, reversing the process of turning a raw material into a “thing”, a bit like some kind of intergenerational energy transfer juju. This was Gina’s therapy, her gentle reconciliation of her mum’s passing. The ball of yarn remains and has, embedded in it, a warm story that can be passed along via touch. Gina invites you all to hold this ball of yarn.

Gina has also constructed a pile of strips of old paintings that echoes the ball of yarn. She invites you to swear at her pile of cut up paintings, the ones that were giving her the shits, that she cut up as a process of art therapy or artist therapy. She also invites you to spend time hanging out with the one she likes, the ones that she birthed successfully and was able to rear, beyond little baby - toddler sketches, through difficult teenage testing palettes into fully grown paintings, rendered strong enough to stand on their own two corners.

Gina is clearly turned on by colour. A colourist; so to speak. This cohort of paintings employs a variety of colour ways and treatments of colour, regulalrly returning to vibrant hues that make your eyes buzz with their fragmentatiuon and fusion. At some point the result gives a sense of peering through a microscrope at delicately stained, recently living tissue. At other points there becomes almost a sense of vertigo, a rising, rapidly, further and further above the surface of the planet.

Gina is almost anxious. She is worried that her world may be turned to grey, that the world as a whole may have all the colour sucked out of it. (I’m not really sure what ius going to happen, but anyway, let’s not let reality get in the way of a good art yarn..). So, she’s telling me these paintings are a relief from this fear. These are like a colourist preppers’ stash - neatly assembled for the colour Armageddon. They might be ike a salve for starving eyes or a kind of rainbow coloured silver bullet to save us from spectral cancer. Or; less dramaticallty, perhaps just a brightly coloured blanky to put over our knees, whilst warming the cockles of our hearth of gently smouldering unicorns. (unicorns release rainbow coloured flames when you burn them.)

In some ways, these paintings escape the need to adhere to carefully, or overtly laid plans. Or perhaps they allow something new to manifest, rather than being a (poor) facsimile of a thing that is already in the world. Abstraction, generally offers us the chance not to have to be exactly as expectations dictate. These paintings offer freedom, adventure and avoidance of rigidity (thank Christ!). This embrace of abstraction will reveal a diversity of impressions that varies from one viewer to the next. To Gina, each of these fields of colour are like an aura, like a sensation, a vibration that might only be slightly discernable but absolutlely influencing a time or place.

In some ways this suite of work is like a set of mantras; a set of things upon which to reflect, in order to better locate oneself or become better in tune with the universe. Gina will insist her universe in unravelling. I tend to disagree. I believe that she is gently and fastidiously pulling elements of her existance apart, ordering them, editing them and reconstructing them in stronger forms. In this exhibition we are presented with various moments in this process and invited to use the objects to consider and realign our own selves.

Coils, loops, tangles, stitches - all make for celever analogies to the ways in which we pass through life. We grow, we build, we erode and we crumble - these might also be suitable analogies. Gina is bravely offering us her unravelling so that we might consider our own and prepare for our own, rather than being surprised by it and caught off guard. She’s also assembled a squandron of colourful oversized aura swatches by which we can check our chakras and get back to chooching along.

Get down ladies and gentlemen, and get into it.

James Dodd