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Caroline Popham’s new collection of works on paper start as a puzzle: experimenting with shape and colour, she creates paper pieces which then make demands of their own about how they work together and where they sit. The works are often created as pairs, colours resurfacing from one side to the other, a formation evolving. They won’t necessarily stay that way; sometimes they split apart and stand alone. Sometimes they have to stay in the dyad. Most often, it’s in the eye of the beholder.
Bringing harmony while never feeling entirely in control, Popham’s work is an exploration of order and disorder, legibility and abstraction, and the point at which each of those qualities intersects with beauty. Her palette will be recognisable from her canvas works; soft, shimmering, tactile colours, often quite translucent, are in constant dialogue with deeper, inkier shades; one’s perception shifts from intimacy to vastness, and back, in a blink.
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The medium of paper has enormous range: it can look rough and urgent or as geometric as landscaping; it can hold very deep tones, or it can reveal every brushstroke; it can draw the eye into the process of colours changing from one shade to another, working in to them, disturbing their purity. The creation can be frenetic and that movement remains in the work. It can be calm, but the calm is deceptive; the energy always finds a way through it.
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‘It was a time of flexibility,’ she says. ‘I started off by getting lost in the colours and the tones, and what emerged are works that are held by structure and form. The process reflected many of life’s realities back at me - that there are infinite possibilities for everything, that you can problem solve using what you have. At a time when the world felt quite dark and heavy, I located a profound lightness in the process, one that I hope emerges in the work.’
Paper Cut Collage
Current viewing_room
