A Painting Show

Amy Gadney + Lydia Gifford + Hannah Luxton + Diana Taylor

at Benjamin Parsons x Hannah Payne

3 - 25 November 2023

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Amy Gadney is an interdisciplinary artist, based in London.Her abstract artwork involves a close engagement with found materials to discover new sensations of life and meaning.Gadney mixes painting, assemblage, and collage. Instead of a blank canvas, she works with unlikely, obscure surfaces that are not usually intended to be ‘art’, materials with a pre-existing personality or history that inspire her instinctive process.

Amy Gadney completed a diploma at Central St Martins School of Art in 1991, a BA Hon in Fine Art at University of West of England Bristol in 1994 and an MA in Fine Art at City & Guilds School of Art, London in 2011 where she was awarded the inaugural GAM Prize. Her work has been exhibited in England, Europe, and US. Her solo show ‘Ghost Load’ was held at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London in 2014. She is the co-founder and Art & Culture editor of Pinboard.com.

Lydia Gifford lives and works in London. She works with painting and sculpture. She uses paint to transform a wide array of textiles in the service of abstract minimalist works with surfaces that are often craggy, layered, and twisted.

2006-2008 Royal College of Art, London, MA Fine Art: Painting

2005 Universität der Künste Berlin, Socrates Erasmus Scholarship

2004-2006 Chelsea School of Art and Design, London, BA (Hons) Fine Art: Painting

Hannah Luxton's paintings are inspired by the late 18th Century Romantic notion that a divine power resides within raw nature. Animistic currents run through the works, hinting towards a higher spiritual dimension. Animism intimates the attribution of a living soul to inanimate objects and natural phenomena, and belief in a supernatural power that organizes and animates the material universe. Luxton finds her subjects in her observations of the remote natural world - the sun, the moon, stars, mountain tops, waterfalls, craters, and ice caverns - condensing and abstracting each referent into an archetypal version of itself.

Hannah Luxton studied for her Masters at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (2010-2012) anfter her gaining her Bachelors of Art at Kingston University in 2009.

Diana Taylor works across painting, printing, textile assemblage, collage, and weaving, shifting between traditional and digital media, her practice converges times and technologies, to investigate a material presence (and absence) of the past within the present. Through an archive of reproductions, she explores the idea of living in an age of the ‘re’.

The images and processes in Diana Taylors work are linked by her pre-occupation with loss and the ruin in visual culture through the circulation, saturation, and degradation of files. The image as a ruin echoes the ecological decline in an age of climate crisis. Over the past decade, she has been screen-printing deliberately low-res images of aftermath from natural disasters. These pictures of destruction are further subjected to a kind of digital entropy through processes of ruination and fragmentation in digital undo, un-painting, and un-making.

2017-23 Practice-based PhD researcher, Sheffield Hallam Uni., in partnership with the William Morris Gallery, London.

2008-10 M.F.A: Painting. Slade School of Fine Art, London

2002-03 P.G.C.E. Art and Design, Institute of Education, London

1996-99 B.A.(Hons) Fine Art: Painting. Bath Spa University College

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