Interview with Gabriella Boyd
"Through the Lens of a Body"
Could you share with us how your artistic journey from studying at the Glasgow School of Art to exhibiting internationally has influenced the themes and techniques in your current work?
Over that span of time, the development of my paintings hasn't been linear, it's more like a web, some paintings looping back in dialogue to others made years before. I know there are periods when I've been particularly porous to the city I'm in, its architecture, its systems, its energy. Other times I've tuned into a more introspective focus. Becoming more comfortable with not knowing has been important and the decision of when to share a work. There's something that can happen when a painting's witnessed in the studio. It somehow becomes independent of you, that can be a really useful way to gain clarity or as a gauge of how it operates.
There is a vivid and blurry quality to your work, reminiscent of dreams. And your collaboration with the Folio Society involved illustrating dream excerpts from Freud's texts. What role do dreams play in your work?
The collaboration with Folio society was back in 2015 and quite specific to a brief – but I remember leaving the project with an acute interest in waking perception more than anything else. It's the relationship between the open eye and the mind's eye that I now constantly come back to. Although the subconscious and dreams will always be present, my works stem more intentionally from waking life. I've named various paintings 'Retina' over the last years. They accumulate to a disjointed series of focal distortions – these no doubt have dream-like qualities, but they come from imagining our inner anatomy. They're as much about giving form to the knowledge of our own bodies and things unseen as they are about vision and the act of looking.
On that same note, your paintings often depict imaginary spaces bathed in ethereal light, and they seem to inhabit a space between reality and imagination. Where do these places come from?
I'd say at the moment I seem to be arriving at places that feel like a heightened sensory perception of an environment. Spaces which hold anatomy in the centre of them. Like the space is being seen through the lens of a body. Once a painting in the studio holds a believable space, it becomes freed in a way from any particular source it came from. Sometimes I'll finish a work and the painted place stays with me and becomes a seed for a new painting.
Your most recent work, particularly in the exhibition ‘Landing‘, explores memory, emotion and sensation. How has your exploration of these realms evolved in your artistic journey?
I've grown to find it freeing to look at the wildly different formal ways artists can speak to these themes. I've been returning to Agnes Martin's paintings and the meditative power they hold. How can a seemingly sterile grid-painting emit so much empathic emotion? When I was working on my painting 'Rime' for 'Landing', I was aware of the oscillation between pure structure and an emerging narrative scene. These two things fused together in a way that released the painting from either one. It's in that balance that I feel a painting can start to get close to the experience of a memory or emotion.
You mentioned painting as an act of translating internal sensations and narratives into visual form. Could you elaborate on how you navigate this process of translating intangible elements into tangible, visual works of art?
I think we all live in the space between our felt experience and our attempts at communicating it. There’s a painting in the show called 'Heart' that nods to the idea of crossing this void like an alarm or a signal being cried out. It conflates a floor-plan and a beating or ringing heart. It's full to the brim with love or pulsing and alive or ringing in alarm. A room seen from above – five doors opening and closing. It flits between micro and macro scale, depending on whether you feel it's architecture or anatomy. The red walls feel almost like annotation to me, like impulsive short-hand. Different to the speed of the fluid flowers drawn into the impasto white centre.
Your painting have a deeply interpersonal element to them, in this context – are there any books or texts that have had a strong influence on your work?
The relationship between chaos and structure in the context of intimacy is something I find makes sense to try to convert into a visual language. The writing of Annie Ernaux speaks directly to this. In Simple Passion she writes of her lived experience of a romance which she's unable to have any control over, as though she’s drowning, and then in the same breath weaves in a completely measured perspective – with control and clarity. I like how she rejects celebration of consistency. She makes room for paradox. I think about paradox a lot when I paint. Multiple truths existing.
What are you most excited about in the upcoming year?
I’ve just come back from a visit to Cample Line, a public gallery in Dumfries, Scotland where I’ll have a show in spring. The building was once part of a row of millworkers cottages. It holds a very particular quality of light and sense of tranquility – it's unlike anywhere I've shown before.