ORGAN PROJECTS at One Church – Florence Road, Brighton
24 to 29 January 2025
Going to church can be so rewarding. Naturally it’s a Sunday and I find myself outside the One Church building in suburban Brighton, quite close to my home. I have been here on a couple of occasions before for the crafts market, but now I learn that there is a studio where Lydia Stonehouse produces her paintings and that a space has been commandeered for a gallery.
Oil on canvas (97x107cm)
Just the one small room, but highly suitable for looking at a carefully selected group of works. Eight paintings from last year are more than enough to give the visitor a good idea of what imagery Stonehouse is developing after graduating from The University of Brighton in 2022 and spending a year at the Phoenix studios as the receiver of the CASS Art X Phoenix Art Space Studio award that supports graduates in that potentially challenging year after completing their first degree.
Six of the paintings are seen at first glance, displayed on three of the walls. Two of these are ‘An ongoing birth’, with a strong landscape feel; which vies with ‘Arrangements’, transforming this sense of a distant view with (possibly) two figures dominating the foregrounded pictorial space. They initially dominate the immediate impression of the display. Four other smaller works, however, actually work well by alternating the various sizes of the works. The viewer must step forward or back to immerse the eye into the variously sized compositions.
Oil and coloured crayon on canvas (35.5x51cm)
After tuning myself into looking at the works, being aware that first impressions can be misleading, I realised that I was attracted most to ‘Bookscan’, a relatively small canvas that was predominantly a subdued green mini-vista that actually felt quite expansive, way beyond the 35.5 X 51 centimeters of its physical reality. The floating linear and rectangular drawn shape within the confines of the canvas edges certainly suggests (is that a contradiction?) an opened book. The impression of a patchy rectangle of light close to the bottom left corner of the canvas brings a notion of time revealed through the light of day. What we perceive, what things are, where we are, are on a continuum. All is in flux, despite the painter’s foolish project to fix things as they are. Yet Stonehouse does not illustrate this; rather, she appears to be engaged on a mission of sorts. Her painting project is nakedly, vulnerably open and questioning. There is no sense of superficiality in these works. She knows when to stop and not to over reach the phenomenon of observation as a painting trope; of visual rhetoric as a too-certain reality.
Then, I feel a little foolish. An arrow prominently marked on the floor points, most unequivocally, to the corner of a curtain. I have been in here for a good 30 minutes or so, totally absorbed by these engaging paintings, but where does this arrow lead? Parting the curtains I am welcomed into this intimate space by two (literally) glowing paintings. ‘Church State’, on my left, feels so small (21X26cm) compared to its equally lustrous ‘Not Even Trying’ (117x127cm) that might be exploding in slow motion. Each work has an embedded set of electric lights behind each canvas. I would like to sit here for a while. This feels like such a quite, meditative space.
Oil and carbon print on canvas. (21x26cm)
I need a chair. I can imagine one. Or perhaps my consciousness is the idea of a chair. Either way, the emanating light and colour creates a sense of the physical painting embodying a phenomenon engaging with me rather than simply being observed. The much smaller work, ‘Church State’ (maybe it’s a landscape) includes a small Christian cross that floats in pictorial space on the right hand side. The larger canvas, ‘Not Even Trying’ is suggestively bodily, physical, earthbound – yet amorphous. I am not sure.
Oil on canvas (117x127cm)
This uncertainty (if I am on the right track) is starkly honest I feel, in Stonehouse’s work. The work is explorative, which is healthy. The fatuous notion of the artist as unattached observer is dissolved. The reward for looking at this work is to know that our sometimes felt disconnection with the world out there is ultimately one, non-dual.
Notes:
Organ Projects is an artist-run space founded in January 2024 and is located within a small room in a church in Brighton. The space exists to bring together and show the work of visual artists both local to Brighton and further afield. They are committed to working with artists and curators to provide space for experimentation, share parts of their practice they don’t often get to show, test ideas, and encourage dialogue with one another.
Links:
Ruminations: Exhibition Reviews 