SALISBURY.- The New Art Centre announces that Vicken Parsons is showing her painting and sculpture in the gallery at Roche Court. In an exciting and radical new departure, she also transformed the exhibition space itself with her largest work to date: a drawing which spans the entire glass façade of the award-winning gallery.
Vicken Parsons is best known for paintings of interiors and landscapes, rendered on a small scale in characteristic muted colours on thick wooden board and sometimes on glass. Her work engages with space and light and is inspired by personal experience, though her paintings are derived from memory and sensation rather than from direct observation. In a recent interview Vicken Parsons described how ‘I like the contradiction of making a large space in a small thing, within the small thing, the space opens up again. But it’s not a real space, obviously, it’s a suggested space – and sometimes it is a cancellation of that’1. Parsons therefore dispels the ‘fourth wall’ of the picture plane and takes the viewer into another dimension of empty rooms and corners, which are occasionally illuminated by a flash of bright yellow, blue, orange or white. Whilst the human figure is absent in the spaces she creates, Parsons conveys a sense of atmosphere and material feeling, allowing an intense ‘presence’ to be easily imagined there.
Iwona Blazwick has described Parson’s paintings as ‘proud… dense little sculptures’2. In fact Vicken Parsons has been making sculpture as well as painting for some time, though her objects were only exhibited in the UK last year in a show organised by Kettle’s Yard in St Peter’s Church, Cambridge. Like the paintings the sculptures are small scale. Made from steel blocks they explore our perception of physical and spatial relationships. Their arrangement of geometric shapes – always rectangular but of different sizes and scales - suggests rigorous planning, like cityscapes seen from above which, we might imagine, contain the kind of interior spaces we see portrayed in the paintings. The steel blocks also provide a surface for her painting and their ‘rational form is made to relent a little under the influence of the calmly expressive brushwork’3.
Vicken Parsons (b. 1957) studied at the Slade and last showed at the New Art Centre in 2006. Other solo exhibitions have taken place at Kettle’s Yard, the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate St Ives and she has been included in group shows at Tate Modern, the Royal Academy, the ICA, Southampton City Art Gallery and Kunsthalle Mannheim. Her work is in a number of important public collections including Tate, Arts Council Collection and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
