tamsinmorse.com

One in the Other is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Tamsin Morse.

The landscapes Morse paints are intentionally of lands that don’t appear to exist in our space and time. They maybe from a lost prehistoric civilisation, or, as yet, undiscovered worlds. The saturated luminosity that hangs suffused over them is redolent of an atmosphere, or solar system, other than our own. The hue might equally be fragrant or toxic. Up close, Morse’s work has much going on, the mark making is a blend of turps-thinned washes, layered grounds and dense pointillist detail. Encrypted into the fabric of the landscapes are a myriad of symbols, motifs, signs and assimilations of habitation. Much of them seem paganistic, ritualised or grounded in belief systems. The surfaces of the land are raw, scarred and intensely amplified and traverse a language between abstraction and figuration. Morse’s paintings appear to be studies and depictions of places but are as much a study of painting as any particular geography.

Morse’s mythical/fictional landscapes are inspired by travelling away from cities both abroad and nearer to home; sometimes long isolated journeys into different continents of up to three months at a time. She is fascinated with man’s relationship to the landscape in each different place and the ritualistic dependency that has emerged both historically and in the present day. These journeys are recorded in the briefest way whilst travelling, the real exploration of them is commenced back at the studio. A combination of memory and imagination formulates her final paintings and drawings and the studio becomes a kind of laboratory for sifting information and synthesizing ideas.

The paintings Morse makes use their subject matter as an imaginary springboard into other realms. Much in the same way as the sovereignty of global lands is dissolving so do the paintings exploit the dissolution of boundaries in their particular medium. However much they seem to be about other worlds, the work remains resolutely grounded in the fiction and immediacy of their medium.