Portrait

Portraits have been a large part of the artist Kate Wilson's work to date. Her earlier work in Ireland was carried out in North Leitrim where the interaction with sitters was in part about developing ties with local community life. This made Wilson focus on the relationship between sitter and artist as well as her own exploration of colour and form. In her portraiture these two areas of investigation are in continuous play. At times the relationship dominates, at others it is let recede to inform our intuition while we observe more abstract forms. Wilson allows each relationship to change how we view a subject. In 2000 she was commissioned by Leitrim County Council to paint the writer John McGahern who became a great influence on Kate's life and work. McGahern's innate understanding of people and empathy with rural life encouraged Kate in her own path of landscape and portrait both stylistically and in choice of subject. This collection of portraits consists of large and small scale canvas's painted in oils with brush and palette knife. Wilson's recent navigations through colour and form suggest a broad sensory palette, engaging the viewer with the textures of sounds, memories and emotions. In her portraits of practicing musicians, she has chosen to allow sound as well as the visual sphere to bare direct influence in decision making during the working process. Some of the sitters in this exhibition are musicians who were invited to practice in Wilson's studio. The cellist Kate Ellis is the subject of a number works. The relationship of performer to instrument is explored, the instrument can be seen as another 'body' in the painting. The practicing musicians included in this exhibition are shown in dialogue with their instruments reminiscent of an exchange between two sitters. Indeed the technical demands of the music being practiced are the result of a dialogue between composer and instrumentalist and in that sense these works could be described also as 'double-portraits'.

The largest portrait in this exhibition is a 16 panel abstract work, ‘Ada’, based on the artist's memories of an absent friend. Wilson uses music here to guide her in the transference of form from the spiritual to the actual. Each canvas is a visualisation of a sound phrase taken from a recording of Irish composer Ian Wilson's 2006 work 'Little Red Fish' for saxophone quartet and choir. From the visualisations, the work was developed as a meditation on the absent sitter. The artist has created for us here windows through which emotions are explored, each panel conjuring a different force and dynamism through its use of colour and form.

Exhibition will run until 1st December