'There is something to Pippa Gatty’s paintings that is like standing at the edge of space. Terrifying, abyssal, infinite, maybe. Like peering out of six-inch thick glass, a bathysphere drifting through curtains of sea snow falling into the deepest trenches of the ocean, and there framed in the ellipsis of the submarine’s yellow-green headlamps a glimpse of some wonder, or nighttime horror.
What creature is this? The shell of some monstrous crab? The glistening dust of moth’s wing upon a window? Or a way-off planetary system glinting through pinpricks in the backcloth?
These scenes (“I’ve always seen them as landscapes,” Gatty insists), seen as if through shielding fingers and squinting eyes, are on the verge of recognisability, like something our mind might make out in the shadows. Sure enough, Gatty describes how she often finds forms and faces in her everyday environment, in the patterns of the wallpaper, the formation of branches in the trees and the shapes in the clouds, and how she gives these visions credence in her paintings. This does not simply look like a face grinning through my dinner plate and bits of rice; it is a face, both accessible and real.
These scenes (“I’ve always seen them as landscapes,” Gatty insists), seen as if through shielding fingers and squinting eyes, are on the verge of recognisability, like something our mind might make out in the shadows. Sure enough, Gatty describes how she often finds forms and faces in her everyday environment, in the patterns of the wallpaper, the formation of branches in the trees and the shapes in the clouds, and how she gives these visions credence in her paintings. This does not simply look like a face grinning through my dinner plate and bits of rice; it is a face, both accessible and real.'
SIÔN PARKINSON is an artist and singer based in Dundee.
