Jeanne Gaigher’s compositions and layering of materials, particularly gauze and canvas, transform the body into a space where narrative accumulates. It exists in symbiosis with its environment, which blossoms, decays, and disintegrates. To maintain balance between the two, an anatomical form becomes visible within the terrain.

Just like the figures in the work test out the limits of their given body, so does the paintings start testing the limits of their edges.

The figures in the work are often interrogating one another or is being interrogated by the place they find themselves in. Or they desire to understand themselves and desire to connect with the place they reside in. How does this questioning or making one another reflect on their presence express itself in material form? The material can push the figure into a mode of such physical self reflection that it looks like something fading away. Or the figure can dig so deep that the surface of the skin becomes a watery substrate to plunge into. The material can work the surface and break open the solid line of the drawing that makes up a fully formed being.

Middle? Being spoken to from the back (history) and from the front (present)

Middle in material form: a delicate relationship between materials and marks and what is seen and what gets lost to the eye or even better just hidden. This is carried out until it becomes a situation or a constructed thing.

These layers don’t exist solely to complete a single image; instead, each layer harbours a distinct intention, energy, life, time, and subject. Each material layer competes or negotiates with the one beneath or above it; this pursuit of interruptions in every element in the paintings and drawings bend and compromise each other’s form. The coexistence of many intentions in a single work creates a sensuality and fragility in its movement that resembles an anatomy of a living being with a dynamic presence, bursting from its scenes and seams.

Mind is hopeful
Middle is the surface, the consequence, the evidence
Mind Middle is the cycle between the two

Mind Middle 6, 2024
Acrylic, ink, watercolour, scrim, raw canvas, thread
142 x 124 cm

 

Mind Middle 6, 2024 (detail)

Mind Middle 6, 2024 (detail)

Mind Middle 7, 2024
Acrylic, watercolour, ink, oil pencils, paper, raw canvas, scrim
Iron bent and hammered in collaboration with a blacksmith
40 x 59 x 15 cm

 

Mind Middle 7, 2024 (detail)

 

Mind Middle 7, 2024 (detail)

 

Jeanne Gaigher – Mind Middle, Installation view

 

Jeanne Gaigher – Mind Middle, Installation view

 

Jeanne Gaigher – Mind Middle, Installation view

 

Jeanne Gaigher – Mind Middle, Installation view

 

Jeanne Gaigher – Mind Middle, Installation view

 

Mind Middle 2, 2024
Acrylic, ink, watercolour, paper, scrim,
raw canvas, thread (stretched on canvas)
120 x 90 cm