Hamish Coleman - For Lack of A Better Word

We are delighted to present Hamish Coleman’s second solo exhibition. Please come along and enjoy the exhibition with Hamish in the gallery Wednesday 22 June from 5.30pm.

For lack of a better word captures the elusiveness and slipperyness of trying to pin down the ephemerality of passing moments, of memory. In this new body of work the challenge for the artist is real as he looks to his own memories rather than to found film stills for his source material.

With his artist partner, who appears in many of the paintings, he has revisited significant sites from his childhood in mid-Canterbury and filmed using a small point-and-shoot camera.

This is the first exhibition of work resulting from the new process creating his own source material and it's a significant and exciting departure. Detachment shifts to connection. Everything is complicated by the insertion of the new into the old, conceptually and materially.

There’s a new glossy depth particularly in the darker paintings. The sense of the fleeting is wonderfully reinforced by his continuing and distinctive exploration of the use and effects of interference paint, which makes the perception of colour dependent on the viewing angle.

It seems like a trite truism to say that these paintings can only be fully experienced by actually seeing them but photographs simply cannot capture the inherent characteristics of the interference paint.