Month: December 2024

EMILY BALL: Walk with me

“Walk with me over cushioned moss; your feet sinking into the soft leaf mould. Pick your way through tangles of bramble and bracken. Stand still and feel held in the quietness beneath the trees. Listen to the birdsong and clatter of leaves. Look up through slats of light between branches. Smell the damp and chill in the air.”

(Emily Ball, December 2024)

We play (mentally and physically) to learn, to discover, to realise. If this attitude diminishes nothing more will change and life will be mundane. It’s especially important for painters, or rather, it’s what I see in the painters who interest me. That’s my personal bias, but I am sure it’s a stance far from unique.

Emily Ball’s work has been on my adoration list for years, so making a fourteen-mile road trip in atrocious weather from Brighton was not a problem. Fortunately Storm Darragh had diminished significantly during the morning, which made the more scenic route north, via Henfield, possible. The countryside is fantastic along the meandering roads that gently rise and fall on the Sussex Weald. A feeling of being in the landscape is so strong, even if travelling in a car. Unknown to me, I was being mentally (and perhaps psychogeographically) tuned in for what was to be seen and experienced quite soon.

Many will know of Seawhites of Brighton (who moved to Partridge Green many years ago) as a great source of art materials, especially sketchbooks. But they have hosted exhibitions for several years too and with this show an expanded office space in an adjacent building to the one with the shop is perfect for a decent sized display that provides more than a taster of someone’s work. This is my first visit to the Atrium Gallery and first thoughts are assured and affirmative: wow, what a space, this is proper painting, everything is interesting (all 44 paintings and drawings). Then, unexpectedly: You don’t see this in the Turner Prize nowadays.

Indeed not. But initial impressions can change with reflection. So I walked around the ground floor for a while longer and was pleased to see that the floor above hosted many more works expertly arranged and hung. After a few minutes upstairs another visitor walked past talking to his partner, and I eavesdrop: “This isn’t kiss me quick or celebrity art”. He was referencing the nearby Brighton (but not so much Hove) art scene. It’s a little unfair, but I get what he means. There’s an abundance of excellent painters whose work is not seen enough down at the coast where the post/neo-Pop, street arty scene dominates. But I had to put that gripe aside for the afternoon and indulge in this engaging imagery from Emily Ball. After all, her work is unequivocally right here, right now whatever the trends might be.

The work in Walk with me is totally absorbing. Many of the other visitors were either standing fully engaged with a particular work for several minutes or strolling around looking and looking again at the display. This is not so commonplace in the gallery environment where looks can be fleeting and it confirmed my sense of the high quality of the works displayed.

Emily Ball’s work in this show might simply be categorised as abstract landscape, but that would not be specific enough to account for a clear individuality of purpose in a lifelong project that engages with a searching, animated and exuberant understanding of the world as experienced. A being in the world, fully connected but including mystery. The works are full of implied movement, visually and physically expressed, by an observer fully engrossed in the act of drawing and painting. The imagery graciously pulls the observer’s gaze into a dynamic conglomeration of forms, coloured patchworks and passages through woodland spaces from the Algarve in Portugal (the Hot Hill collection) back to the artist’s home in Sussex (an ongoing series called Woodland Weave). The paint is applied skilfully with dexterity, self-confidence and years of practice – but healthily retains an aspect, or an edge, of testing out applications and combinations of sometimes raw but playful brush marks. There is a sense of a positive and intentional work in progress, or a springboard for future works yet to be realised. This animated feeling confirms that environments are never really still or are only observed with a rational eye. Nature’s spaces are in and around us, containing histories and yet moving on.

So, in the future, we can look forward to an expanded Woodland Weave exhibition that explores the woods at the rear of the artist’s childhood home, merging with her parents’ garden. As with any space that Emily Ball draws and paints this will be as much an emotional as a geographical space. It will be past, present and future. We might be reminded, or prompted, to recall our own equivalent spaces to conjure the psychogeographic nature of environments that are personal, familial and, ultimately, social. This is a distinctive potential for the age-old practice of painting and drawing.

First impressions can even improve, too. See Emily play.

Geoff Hands (December 2024)

LINKS:

For high quality images of Emily Ball’s artwork visit – https://emilyball.net/

Instagram – @emilyballpainting