Wednesday 8 October 2014

Indelible Shadows by Malina Busch

Indelible Shadows
Malina Busch 

Charlie Booth writes: 

Last Friday, the London based artist Malina Busch, delivered an interesting talk where she guided visitors around her latest exhibition at South Square Gallery.

Indelible Shadows is the result of the Joan Day Painting Prize, an annual bursary awarded to support emerging painters in the memory of the Yorkshire artist Joan Day. 

The exhibition although not curated chronologically, does show the gradual progression in technique within Malina’s most recent work. Displaying the different ways in which she has moved away from a traditional application of paint on stretched canvas to creased canvas with paint or chalk applied and finally ending in a manipulated piece of pre-dyed felt. For Malina even when not applying paint to the surface she is still painting; playing with the textures, shapes and shadows on the material. During the talk she discussed the evolution of her work, explaining that in the studio she became frustrated with her inability to capture the effect she wanted upon a stretched canvas. To solve this she intuitively removed the frame and began working freely with the canvas material itself manipulating the textiles until the folds and creases created the desired effect of light and shadow.  

Her paintings capture the ephemeral moments which fail to be fully experienced and recorded, but instead are fleetingly glimpsed. Whilst guiding us around her exhibition she explains that Indelible Shadows was inspired by the moon and its temporal qualities. The moon, as she describes, changes nightly in colour and intensity of light and it is this which she aimed to capture in the range of canvases on display. She is interested in a process of making as a way of lending physical form to the moon’s traces left behind by time, memory and imagination.

During installation, the second room within the gallery gradually became orientated around the colour purple. Each large scale piece displayed within the room displays a range of techniques for applying this deep and brooding colour to the canvas.  When it came to adjusting lighting levels, there was a wonderful moment where, focusing a direct light on to one of the canvas, the intensity of the colour purple came alive on the painting’s surface. 
Indelible Shadows is a playful representation of the annual painting prize. Malina has taken the traditional Joan Day bursary and flipped it in to something which not only explores colour, light and subject but texture and material. 

Malina Busch’s Indelible Shadows is open 12-3pm Tuesday – Sunday at South Square Gallery, Thornton until the 23rd November. 

@South_Square 
@MalinaBusch



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