Gallery to display Gillian King paintings made from extracted pigments of decaying plants

By Emma Jiayue Liu

Ottawa-based artist Gillian King’s exhibition Ghosts, curated by PDA Projects, will be on display April 13-28 at General Assembly, a Hintonburg art gallery just west of Centretown.

The exhibition features King’s large-scale, multi-medium abstract paintings. They represent a new series of paintings made with extracted pigments from decaying plants and flowers.

“I draw from elements of ecology, palaeontology, politics, mysticism and the occult, and make use of specific materials including plant and vegetable matter, hair, animal ashes, sand, dirt, and raw pigments, for their physical properties and symbolic relevance,” said King.

“Ghosts are traces of the past seen in present forms. They exist between decay and renewal,” states an exhibition overview. The exhibition title “is an invitation to consider the topography of painted surfaces and our relationship to landscapes today.”

The paintings for the exhibition are colourful. In contrast to her previous series of paintings, these latest works present colour in a different way, with subtle transitions and transparencies due to the nature of plant dyeing.

Brendan A. de Montigny, the exhibition’s curator and owner of PDA Projects, explained that King works with materials such as beeswax and earth sediments, and has now incorporated plant pigments that are extracted through steam-dyeing methods.

“I decided to put together this exhibition as a culmination of her evolving process of making her own dyes,” said Montigny.

Because the paintings were made while King was travelling, “the works have plant materials and earth sediments from all of Europe, as well as plants and flowers from Ottawa,” said the artist.

King is originally from Winnipeg. PDA Projects has represented her for the past five years since she moved to Ottawa.

King won the 2017 Nancy Petry Award, which came with a $10,000 prize that allowed her to travel to Europe to gain inspiration for her work.

King was also the 2017 recipient of the RBC Emerging Artist Award for Ottawa.

“Ghosts was made with elements of my previous series of paintings in mind, but with the influence from my recent travels and new processes,” said King. “I find them to be slower, more meditative paintings both in how they are made and how they are experienced by the viewer.”

“(She) is not just following a trend, she is using the history of abstract painting to build upon,” said Landon Mackenzie, the award’s coordinator.

King said her work developed and matured while in the MFA program at the University of Ottawa. Penny Cousineau-Levine, director of the program, recalled that King, “over the course of doing her MFA, at one point, she moved from using a brush to using her hand.”

King said that using her hands to paint gives her a more intimate understanding of the materials.

“I replaced it with my hand by using my physical body, which talks to the questioning of the significance of my material and relation to my subject matter,” said King. “I find touch to be very important when building a relationship with (my) materials and surroundings. There is a specific satisfaction having wax squeeze through (my) fingers, similar to playing with clay, or mud while gardening.”

“With her personal use of organic material, she is bringing something new to abstraction,” said Cousineau-Levine.

“I believe the artworks deal with themes that are relevant today in terms of dealing with how we relate to the natural world,” added de Montigny. “King’s work has the ability to channel the beauty of abstract art with larger issues relating to bio-ethics, ecology, and geography as it relates to climate change.”

An opening reception for Ghosts will be held at General Assembly, 5 Fairmont Ave., on April 13 from 7-11 p.m. Attendees will receive limited-edition packages of seeds for pollinator-friendly plants, which “when fully grown can be harvested to make natural dyes.”