Jocelyn Clarke’s first major London solo exhibition, a new body of her characteristic small paintings. Within each of her small canvases the tension of the surface of the picture, and the forms and spaces described within it, are built up with fine painted lines.
Jocelyn Clarke paints and draws at the same time, making crosshatch markings across the entire surface of the canvas to describe the already obscured surface of an object. Her subject matter is the minutiae of domestic life: the odd conjunction of disparate items gathered in the corner of a sofa, belongings often handled but rarely noticed, the corners and edges of rooms. The colour becomes dense where there is a buildup of descriptive lines, accretions of paint creating edges and boundaries.
What begins as a slow study of a particular object undergoes a transformation as the painting assumes its own reality and two and three dimensions melt in and out of each other.
