Work | Hermione Pakenham

‘FUENTE AMARGA: A Space Between’ (2016)

The Fuente Amarga series was created in response to the dry river bed in the South of Spain where I have been living. The paintings use a titanium buff as a base echoing the dusty, arid ground and colour is used sparingly and purposefully, to force the viewer to see beyond the surface; to take time in the looking.

My drawings as well as paintings, show a sequence of seasons and colours, and my use of white is a metaphor. I believe the absence of colour and of noise, presents the viewer with a profoundly private moment, a disappearance of self. It is both a startling strangeness and a silence alive with possibility: it is a space between.

Whilst abstract in nature, I painted many of the pieces outside, and in that way feel they respond directly to the surroundings of not just light and space, but also the conditions of searing heat in Summer and the icy winds of Winter and Spring. In method, my paintings strive to speak for the balance in Nature between the indefinable, open, accidental, separate and at the same time ordered, rhythmic, specific and unifying.

On a more general level, I am interested in the importance of place – how place becomes the people we love and lose, as well as a ground for mapping our own stories and identities. By layering and building images, I try and recreate the process of time – how we patchwork ourselves and our lives in fragments. Every painting I make, I start with both an image or a set of ‘possible shapes called likeness’ and a feeling – a light within a light, the loss of self and the everyday.