Days go by, one after the other, memories of yesterday’s dinner vanish alongside moments that our cranial philosophy deems forgettable. So, she logs and remembers, using the captured moment to fill her mind with the shimmering water whose ripples are convexed by the solar light; remembering how she made that high-pitched squeak at the end of her laugh so she puts down her tumbler onto the soggy pub coaster hoping people will remember the way she placed the glass rather than her shrill chords; the gathering of friends after their first exhibition opening together blurred but not enough to hide their ambitious youthful grins.
Art can be traced across the central belt in Scotland, and that statement includes the Forth Valley region. Based in Stirling and in the final stages of her undergrad at the University of Stirling, artist Niamh J McFarlane is undergoing the journey of student to building a career as an artist.
Photographs are a connective tissue to memories for Niamh J McFarlane, a way to travel back to a moment past – immortalised by the ephemeral medium. But it isn’t entirely the content of the image that she encapsulates but rather the colour – that sun’s rays producing a glaring yellow and white; the browns and golds of the pub; the black and sparkles of the alley entrance to the gallery. McFarlane regenerates these moments through viscerally expressive movements splattering paint across the canvas as if her arm a cannon bursting with viscous confetti that sprays onto and beyond the canvas. It speckles the white walls of her studio, like a reverse burning of the image; it is a lively visualisation of the memories breaking free of their frame and into the world.
This specific act of painting is therapeutic to McFarlane, utilising the penetrative ability of the photograph ranging from stills extracted from recordings, phone images, and Polaroids enabling her to relive the memories. Previously, McFarlane had dedicated time to collating her images over a 6 month timespan to produce a digital account referred to as her colour diary. A singular photo or a collection of photos captured over the month fuelled the production of her striking works of art. Within the Studio Chats we couldn’t help but admire the possibilities this strategy holds and how it can be developed further as an artistic tool to guide her work, as she expresses the struggle of translating her application from mentored to independent.
Being a student, McFarlane sourced artists who align with her methodologies. Enraptured by the rapid and colourful brushstrokes of Joan Mitchell; the deconstructed environments sourced from memories by Barbara Rae; and the emotion-fuelled expression and application of paint onto canvas performed by Niki de Saint Phalle – all of these women artists have impacted McFarlane’s work approach through memory, emotion and technique.
McFarlane expressed her kindred experience of the thoughts-lived, as professed by de Saint Phalle, of her famed act of shooting paint onto the prepared canvas’. The firing evidenced by the explosive tendrils of colour, and immortalised by the photograph.
This moment of release was a pivotal moment for both de Saint Phalle and McFarlane. She looked onto her surroundings as an informant in how she was going to articulate her performance of colour thrown and sprayed across the hedge-supported canvas. Reimagined at the Stirling Forth Valley College’s quaint outdoors, nestled beside a river and on looked by the Wallace Monument; McFarlane’s motion shimmered like the water and her medium convexed around her canvas like the solar rays.
“My surroundings play such a vital role in what happens. It’s never planned out – it can’t be. But there is always an idea and that’s enough; just to have an idea, even if it’s a feeling.”
Keep an eye out for the her next exhibition at:
City Contemporary Art Gallery, Perth
20 Charlotte St, Perth, PH1 5LL
https://ccart.co.uk/
Opens 13th of July, 2024
Website: https://niamhjmcfpaintings.wixsite.com/niamhjmcfpaintings
Instagram: @niamhmcfarlaneart
Written by A-J Reynolds
Gal bag. 