Introduction

"Varying degrees of presence lead to different strengths of voice, tensions. The intimate is measured and restrained. A library of nuance is taken from a private studio activity, to a public site, a public moment. Halfway objects provide a starting point. Things come into being in their very utterance, emerging through the telling. I question which of my actions 'hold' their own, what can stay. Some insist, some withdraw. The work sits on the boundary of completion, where tenses co-exist." – Lydia Gifford , 2011

Lydia Gifford's artistic research is an enquiry of the language and possibilities of painting, of painterly thought, which are subsequently allocated and transposed by means of subtle actions, gestures, ideas and processes into a physical space. This activity, like a silent choreography, underpins ones reading of the work. The exhibition is marked as a common-ground where the works mutually create points of fragmentation and linger, in which they are to be activated and meaning is to be reinvented by the presence of the viewer. 

For the David Roberts Art Foundation, Gifford creates new in-situ installations in the gallery that prior to the opening reception, will become her studio, her testing ground, her stage and her mental space. With Gifford, the works are never detached from their context, they are on the contrary originated by the context as much as they create their own conditions of perception and sometimes production. Gifford investigates painting as a temporal attempt to visually crystallize a fragile moment of surfacing and its temporal indecision.

This exhibition, curated by Vincent Honoré, director and curator of the David Roberts Art Foundation, marks the first solo exhibition by Lydia Gifford in an institution.

Lydia Gifford (b. 1979, UK) lives and works in London.

Event

This will be a rare opportunity to experience improvised music by John Coxon, Evan Parker and Toma Gouband, made in direct response to artworks. The musicians have been exchanging ideas and references with Lydia Gifford over a period of time, ideas such as a non verbal practice and communication, repetitions and differences, improvisations and rhythms, interaction between thought and the physicality of playing or making, and the private experiments of the studio made public.