Glasgow-based artist Hayley Tompkins’ new exhibition sees her work at last year’s Venice Biennale reconfigured across the two floors of The Common Guild with several new additions.
A series of encased stock photographic prints are laid intimately across the gallery floor alongside half-filled bottles of coloured liquids and pigmented abstractions in ready-made plastic trays. Gleaned from the infinite pool of virtual imagery, these secondhand pictures of pebbles, rainbows, cityscapes and everyday objects come together in a constellation of the natural and the artificial, of light and matter.
Through careful selection and arrangement, Tompkins sieves and filters images like sediments, allowing the mind’s eye to pick and unpick associations beyond the purely visual. We are invited to ponder upon the significance of a grain of sand next to a galaxy of stars as our gaze transverses the space between the mundane and the sublime.
This semi-automatism in the act of looking is mirrored in the way the accompanying paintings are made. Layers of watercolour and acrylic paint are swirled in translucent containers and allowed to settle over time to form abstract compositions. The colours in the paintings reference those in the corresponding photographs as if the pigments were residual particles of developing prints on wet plates.
But Tompkins’ process is more alchemy than chemistry. Here, paint is dislodged from representation just as images are freed from their original context. This separation allows coincidences between material and imagery to rise to the surface. We begin to consider how a particular grey might relate to the fogginess of a polluted highway or how a painterly texture might conjure the surface of a planetary crater.
In this way, Tompkins is doing what painters have always done – to break down the observable world into its components and reconstitute it through the embodiment of paint. Specific to this presentation at The Common Guild, Tompkins has humorously introduced a number of plastic foodstuffs into the setup. Artificial slices of meat and bread sit curiously on thin paint as if to remind us of the invisible space of the body through which we come into contact and grasp all that is around us.
On the second floor, the painted trays are hung simply on the wall and viewed on their own. Echoes of images from our previous encounter with the work find resonance in these purely abstract forms. The simple gesture of transposing the horizontal onto the vertical unravels a pictorial latency where ovoid shapes and overlapping whirls bring to mind shimmering landscapes and explosions in the sky. If the installation downstairs operated like Monet’s Water Liles – visually expansive and physically immersive, then upstairs, Tompkins is a painter of dramatic light, like a contemporary Turner.
Taken together, the gathering of works in ‘Digital Light Pools’ sets up a state of play between sensations and ideas that is greater than the sum of its parts. Tompkins’ strength lies in her ability to slow down our experience of time by seeking out moments of connection and imbuing them with a sense of mystery and epiphany in equal measures. In so doing, she reveals to us the gravitas of the quotidian and the lightness of cosmos.
