Rosslynd Piggott - Measuring Night

Moments of changing light are directly referenced in Piggott’s new series of paintings. The expansive Night – 24 hours mimics the subtle tonal variations of a night sky, creating shifts between the light and dark of the pictorial field. Stretching across this atmospheric background is a further line of data, which records a ‘colour swatch’ of the sky as it moves between the cool blue of day and deep black of night in a space of 24 hours. In Night – hovering scent of Magnolia Soulangiana Vulcan, Piggott captures the synaesthetic experience through the poetic relationship between colour and scent. Her memory of this particular magnolia species’ scent reveals the note levels, which are rendered as violent and pink hues.

A further exploration of natural phenomena occurs in Piggott’s Cloud Window & Black Hole works, where the artist juxtaposes a series of lightly rendered cloud formations in 10 different cloud types, against an intense black void, their relationship hovering between material presence, the ephemeral and the unknowable. The Mirror mirror works consist of two panels, each with its own distinct material resonance. A heavily textured palladium leaf surface is juxtaposed with the lighter, reflective qualities of handcrafted molten, mirrored glass. Continuing on from the work completed for Extract: in 3 parts (ACCA, 2008), these panels simultaneously attract and repel, as the viewer attempts to make out their blurred reflection in the fluid surfaces before them. A further tension is created between the strong material presence of the panels and the fleeting quality of the light which plays across their contrasting surfaces.