PENNY COSS

Island

Landscape and the matrix of imagination: an emptying out?

I often spend time walking through my local wetland region. In the span of these walks, thoughts give way to the act of walking, to the rhythm of my body, present as I progress through the landscape. Reaction to unseen cambers and obstacles along the way to prevent myself from falling are brought to the studio in a race against time and I tip the canvases to their extreme as the gravitational pools of paint flow.

These local wetlands, bordered by an urban fringe, are unclaimed spaces, a 'no man's land'. These diminishing water bodies are the colour of dark glass rising and falling which breathe a hidden history. That part of landscape 'that remains uncultivated is partly the memory it preserves of what hasn't happened yet'.

In the studio the drying pools of paint are aided by a traversing brush or rag with impatient rhythm, building histories absent but not yet present. I paint the terrain in the heavy hot air that turns thin to cold during the dark winter months. Part memory, imagination and reinvention, this place is my muse.

Recent and past urban planning of a dystopian force has made its 'claim' on these wetland areas and paved the way for orderly plots, planted vegetation over once dredged lakes and a leveling of the ground over once meandering tracks of a purposeful nature and bundled together with little connection to the historical terrain. With their diminishing water bodies this once creative region is stymied with the matrix of imagination emptying out and so to fall in line with one concrete path to blindly follow.

- Penny Coss, 2011

View CV

View works from Penny's most recent exhibition 'Island' HERE

View a previous catalogue of Penny Coss's work HERE.