Nina has been invited by Purdy Hicks Gallery to exhibit at Solo Contemporary at the British Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery, 28th September to 1st October 2023.
SOLO CONTEMPORARY, British Art Fair's contemporary platform was launched in 2022 to great success. Ten galleries and dealers each selected one artist for a solo show in this second floor section curated by Zavier Ellis of Charlie Smith London.
For her show, Nina has developed a new process, creating seven new paintings in watercolour and pastel.
"The chance discovery of a pool of light, falling through a window, casting and shifting over the surface of the concrete walls of a disused barn on the isle of Ulva. The image stayed with me. I keep wanting to paint this discovered space. The light had hit the ground at the right moment and then dispersed up the concrete wall. It all appeared in a few moments. An intense patch of light; which then was gone.
The pieces are a meditation on an immersive space of shifting depth and colours; trying to paint the intangible, where light displaces gravity and the image continually shifts and moves. It is a process of reiteration between the paintings.
I started with one painting, and then another, and then each of the paintings in the series is part of a whole, a single body of work. Each painting leads onto the next, they all relate. I dream the colours. They inhabit me and I inhabit the image, and so I recreate it in different ways and all the paintings speak together to create a whole, there is not just one image or memory but a series from the experience of being there. But it is not about being there, it is a remembered experience and space, each is a different variation on the memory. It is a starting point for something to happen on each painting, and each then has its own moment, somehow. Each has its own life. This group of works should best considered together as an installation.
The paintings are built up with layers of transparent watercolour and opaque soft pastel, washed away and reapplied - a new way of working for me which is etherial, delicate and transient and is borne out of these paintings. It is all about chance: a chance encounter of finding the pool of light at the right time; a painting process that creates random moments to chapture."