Project Ability is very pleased to present, for the first time, a solo exhibition of work by Rachel Hook in our annual MONO showcase. Rachel works in our Create programme and is a painter of insistently elaborate shapes which she precariously balances on stark white paper or paints onto brightly layered canvases.
In Rachel’s work, colour is important; a flaming haze that roars across shadowy backgrounds in a seductive flurry of collisions between dashes, stripes and brush strokes. Scale, too, is important; from small intricate works to very large bold statements. Rachel’s compositions wrestle and jolt on the canvas delivering a sense of the Baroque. Scale is both liquid and relative guiding the eye across a cluster of dabs, fleckles and swathes; a process of expression with both obvious intent and evident accident.
In contrast to her paintings, Rachel’s coloured pen drawings are a build-up of anomalous outlines which create kaleidoscopic and psychedelic forms. Elephants, deer, trees and birds take the form of variously shaped coloured swatches of rainbow lines. With increasing complexity and ever-reducing scale, these animals emerge from a background made up of nothing but blanch white paper.
Emotional matter gusts through Rachel’s work and in their complexity, they ensure a lengthy encounter that eventually leads to an interpretation of their blazing realness.
Mono, 10 Kings Court, Glasgow, G1 5RB
Sun – Thur, 11am – midnight, Fri & Sat, 11am – 1am