Emerging Artist Of Yorkshire 2019.

Scott Foundation

SOLO SHOW

APG Works,
Sheffield
2018 16th-23rd October
 

Sheffield’s APG Gallery consists of two small rooms and a short adjoining corridor. Viewing work there is thus an intimate experience, never more so than for Katie Jamieson’s solo show ‘Emerging Spaces’. The first room houses smaller work, some so delicate they could be mistaken for ancient relics in their beautiful frames. 

Each piece seems in a state of unravelling, some more than others. Equally, some are more colourful, as if newer or predicting highly-coloured facades of the future. 

The second room features Katie’s larger works, the cumulative effect creating the sense that we are in a built-up urban space, surrounded by skyscrapers and skeletal structures. There is no doubt we are immersed in a city in constant flux, with all its colour, decay, shiny new building and crumbling architecture, accompanied by ghosts of an industrial past and promises of a perfect future. Katie has set the stage with subtle use of suggested, half-recognisable forms, incomplete patches of rich hues shifting into a bare, raw substrate. It is at once stark and enticing. Katie’s imaginary city is an exciting place, yet not without menace and trauma. The zig-zagging, criss-crossing lines of paint and cotton thread calls to mind scaffolding, reinforcing the thought that we are not only looking at a painting but also a metaphor for a state of mind, and possibly also for the nature of a type of picture-making in which elements are added and removed, re-worked, resulting in a palimpsest, betraying its own history.        

Her artwork silently inches outwards, extending its fragile tendrils as if searching for something. It is as robust as the crumbling architecture that inspires it, yet also so delicate as to be almost invisible, occasionally existing as a shadow. 

By Sean Williams 2018.