Mimei Thompson

PV 11 October

- Part of 'Primary Late' 

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More information:

https://www.facebook.com/events/474262939726042/

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Exhibition continues 

19 October - 10 November

Fridays & Saturdays 

12-5pm
And at other times by appointment - post@tradegallery.org

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I can see that the works have gone through a transformation of sorts since your previous show at Trade back in 2014. These feel like they occupy a different space, rather than the still-life type of works you were making of dead flies, plump fruit and bin bags. What are your thoughts on the changes in the theme of the work?

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I wasn’t able to paint for over a year, due to health issues. The new paintings are from the last couple of months, and I feel I am picking up the various strands of my interests and continuing with them. I’m sure there probably have been shifts, too, but it feels too early to know. I have been painting more dead flies, and bin bags may well reappear too - I take photos of them, when they catch my eye.

 

What is is about these things that you like? They’re not particularly attractive in a straightforward sense, but perhaps these subjects somehow balance out the painterly quality?

 

Yes, I think that’s right. I am also interested in the idea of the grotesque as it is embodied in the mixing and collapsing of categories, and the combining of opposites. Bringing together attraction and repulsion, beauty and ugliness, or taking the everyday, overlooked or base, and seeing it as extraordinary can bring an energy and humour and magic to things that I enjoy.

 

It also makes me think of the Dutch Masters’ work with dead animals, flies and peeled fruit. I guess that was metaphorically useful as a shortcut to talking about mortality, or religious stories. What is your relationship to the still life? Is it something that interests you?

 

The Dutch still life tradition, and the idea of memento mori is definitely in there. I have recently been looking at Otto Marseus van Schrieck, a Dutch 17th Century artist that painted in a still life, night-time, ground-level, forest-floor genre (sottobosco, as it came to be know) filled with snakes, toads, lizards, moths, mushrooms and thistles. He examines these specimens with a clear scientific eye that is in common with other Dutch still life genres, that I connect to, even if I don’t necessarily emulate.

 

I love the crystal clarity of Dutch still life. My work, however, doesn’t tend to go into the fine detail of what is represented, but rather there is a first fast stage of painting, then a close up working stage where I will highlight and flesh out, or cross examine the brushstrokes themselves, and the act of painting, rather than going back to the specifics of whatever is being represented.

 

With some of the red works, it’s almost like the paint marks have a sort of life to them, that they’ve grown from trying to represent something, and have become their own organism. How did the red works come about?

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In all my work, I have an interest that the paint marks both be representational and also just themselves. I was making some paintings of (green) grass, and then just shifted from green to red. Its an enjoyment of pure pigment, and also just a simple switch of colour takes them somewhere else, to another kind of organism as you say. It could be more related to a sea anemone. I also think if the red and green works sit side by side it’s about representation and perception.

                                                                                                                  

In some of the works I can see these things they look almost like moon shapes, perhaps it’s a spooky / horror narrative suggested in the work?

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I have been working on a series of paintings from the same source image, which is photo of a tree in a street next to a railway line, that I would walk past on my way home from the studio. The light in it is actually a streetlight, not a moon, though this can be seen in some works (if you look closely) and not so much in others. I like the way that the everyday can be transformed into something more transcendent or poetic, but still be also to a degree quite simple and deadpan. I think having not painted for a long time, this series of trees worked as a way back into painting. Also, in my illness, I got to a place where it felt like my body was just shutting down in multiple different ways, and this twilight place seemed appropriate to explore. I realised long after I’d made it that one of the paintings had the exact same blue as the concertina hospital curtains around my bed. I think that on some level some of these works processing this. I wish maybe I’d made it more evident that it was a street light not a moon, but also I’m ok with different readings and associations that are brought to them. For me this series is about time standing still and being in a twilight or nightfall or crepuscular, dusk place, as a metaphor for a state of being.

 

I’m also interested in where you think the work is heading, are these new paintings the start of a new body of work or its it more explorative than that? Do you even think of them as bodies of work?

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I feel like the paintings are mainly continuing strands of ongoing interests, and that there are a lot of paintings I want to make. Some of this new body of work has been a way to just start getting going again, as my health has slightly improved and allowed it.