Slim Glimpses - solo show at Cample Line, Dumfriesshire, 2023

AMY WINSTANLEY

SLIM GLIMPSES

8 July – 10 September 2023

 

Slim Glimpses is an exhibition of thirteen new paintings by Amy Winstanley, opening 8 July 2023. Installed in our downstairs space, the exhibition includes new paintings that build upon Amy’s distinctive body of work, combining vivid colour and a rich painterly language in compelling compositions that envision new possibilities for being in the world. A newly commissioned short essay by writer and programmer Caitlin Merrett King will accompany the exhibition.

 

The exhibition’s title, Slim Glimpses, derives from what Amy has referred to as ‘small moments… when I might feel some sort of connection to the world.’ These are moments, she has suggested, that briefly interrupt our everyday activities: ‘there is a birch tree outside our flat, and I make a point of touching it and looking up. And for one moment, for one glimpse, I am thinking of the tree as a different sort of being and how different that is from me as a person, as a human...Then I go on to do my normal daily things.’ Whilst developing the work for this exhibition, Amy has drawn on the work of writers Donna J. Haraway, Karen Barad and Matthew Hall. She has said: ‘I was thinking of this research in tandem with my own experience of being in the world. There are glimpses of hope in the reframing of who we are and how we live to include all those we are entangled with, human and nonhuman, in order to cultivate a better way to live with the world.’

 

In her essay, Caitlin Merritt King suggests: ‘Painting, for Amy, is a way of putting down roots.’ The body of work included in Slim Glimpses is rich in allusions to the natural world – suggestions of foliage, trees, clouds, fields, sunny orbs, hills and water discernible across the canvases. Amy grew up in Dalry in rural Dumfries and Galloway, and she spent her childhood immersed in the countryside, and consequently, a profound sense of connectedness to the natural world pervades her work. More domestic references can be picked out too – hints of a sunny window or the edge of a building perceptible in paintings such as Name Us to Love Us or Untitled.

 

Amy describes her process in the studio as open and quite fluid, typically constellating around a number of simultaneous activities. When painting, she moves between making conscious marks based on memory and using her intuition based on mood, feeling and thoughts: ‘I might make a mark that I am remembering, but also a mixture of intuitive mark-making along with all these thoughts that are going around in my head about the title…they all merge slowly together.’ She might listen to a podcast, she may switch between painting in her sketchbooks and painting on the canvases, or she might read a book or look up an artist’s monograph. Gradually things start to emerge and the work evolves: ‘I might start off in a light mood…and then it evolves over time to change as my mood and my thinking is changing.

 

Amy works on many canvases at the same time, sometimes moving them around the studio, placing them on the wall or on the floor: ‘That’s what’s painting is for me, it’s like a continual movement in flux and even in the medium itself.’ This can extend across bodies of work: Amy worked on new paintings for Slim Glimpses and for her exhibition Lost Hap with Margot Samel in New York at the same time: ‘there are crossovers…I find that happens anyway in the work.’ Consequently, although they are distinct shows, the individual canvases in the two exhibitions have a kind of kinship or bond: ‘I want them to do different things in themselves and be doing different things to the viewer…I try and change palettes as I am working, but because I tend to work on them all at once…the palette can then bleed in to the next.’

 

Amy has also developed a prodigious sketchbook practice, which she sees as integral to the way she works. Her sketchbooks are a way for her to work on a different scale, using up paint left over on the palette, and to help her ‘remember to loosen myself up again with the actual act of painting.’ Sometimes the paintings take weeks to evolve and sometimes they come together more quickly. She has said that she likes to vary the texture and action in her paintings, using dry brush strokes that give luminosity to canvases such as Reverberative Business, or sections of ‘wet on wet’, as with the beautiful small work Tilt, where Amy has built up denser strokes of paler and darker greens. She also acknowledges that the paint itself can move her in a certain direction with a particular work: ‘just the way that the paint forms on the canvas also makes you move it in a certain direction, or the relationship between different colours make you do a more staccato kind of brushstroke…there’s all that going on at the same time.’

 

Slim Glimpses has been supported by Creative Scotland.