TIME, BEING

We are delighted to present TIME, BEING presenting recent paintings by three exciting UK-based contemporary artists: Adam Hedley, David Abbott, and Jon Ridge. All three artists work to varying degrees along the intriguing border line between figuration and abstraction, with their paintings sharing a suggestive ambiguity of image and richly coloured, layered surfaces which invite you into the work. David Abbott’s beautiful small works are more descriptive of the landscape, but these, too, are characterised by a move towards abstracting or perhaps better distilling the landscapes he explores into their essence of form, colour, and pattern. As a collection, these paintings share a sense of deep connection with the spaces that they recall or re-imagine, an invitation to the viewer to forge their own personal connection with, and journey into the image and the world to be found within it.

ADAM HEDLEY

Adam Hedley (b 1985, High Wycombe, UK) lives and works in Bristol. Adam’s amorphic and free-form compositions operate in the space between nature, figuration and abstraction. Building up colour washes and dry brushed layers, influenced by modernist and colour field methodologies, Adam works with traces of an image, the perception of physical forms, and a pushing and pulling between one place and time and another. His paintings’ textured and blurry surfaces suggest a slow methodical approach and conjure up a spiritual and meditative practice engaged with reality, fragments of history, memory, ancient practices and reimagined spaces.

DAVID ABBOTT

David Abbott (b. 1981) lives and works in Bristol. As a teenager he moved with his family in 1995 to Virginia, USA, where he attended high school and then studied Fine Art at James Madison University. David later returned to the UK and completed his MA in Multidisciplinary Printmaking at The University of the West of England.

David uses paint, collage, and drawing to explore the intersection of the natural world and human activity within the landscape. His deep landscapes evoke a spirit place where the land, natural world, present moment, history, folk, and personal memory all corral together. The inputs may be mundane or transcendent, but the created moment is a quiet, focused expansion of reality out of which all the work gets made. David is interested in folk song and lore, how it locates and defines people inside a landscape, and centres them – through the evocations of folk memory – when outside it.

JON RIDGE

Jon Ridge graduated in 2009, with a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College Of Art after previously working as a graphic designer and advertising art director. He currently lives and works by The Thames at Erith, Kent.

Jon's graphic design background, although perhaps not always detectable, feeds into the ambiguous mix of Ridge’s paintings. A subtle interplay between abstraction and figuration is what interests him. “I’ve always liked painting that gives you something to do, uncertainty and visual suggestion lends itself to the viewer projecting their own reading and personalizing a connection with it”.