PIPPA YOUNG

Young’s work proposes a reality in which the chaos of contemporary life – our scattered attention, pervasive uncertainties and dependence on technology for private reassurance and communal feeling – are not cause for despair, but are instead a possible resource. In Young’s guide for surviving this altered present, the disintegration of our established routines and imagined horizons clears the way for experimental dialogues, transhistorical affinities, unanticipated intimacies and a new attunement to beauty. 

 

Her singular paintings emerged through digesting an omnivorous range of intellectual and cultural source materials, but were equally the product of many small, deceptively simple physical acts. It is this inconspicuous, diligent work which at once transforms her painting into a contemplative practice, and lends the images themselves their serene, introspective feel.

 

Young’s paintings invite us to linger over precisely detailed, almost photorealistic, facial features and angular structures, while her collages and redactions present us with enigmatic texts which reward re-readings, and aphorisms which under closer scrutiny shape-shift into private confessions. 

Rebecca Birrell 

(2022)

 

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Uncertainty, identity and materiality in a digital world

 

Ideas which inform my work derive both from my personal experience with the process and act of painting, as well as wanting to reflect something of what it is like to be human in an uncertain world. The work explores themes of uncertainty, psychological identity, notions of reality, of fragility, of doubt; and the fragmentary nature of contemporary experience. 

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I am interested in how we construct a psychological identity through fragments of experience and memory. ‘Who we are’ is often dependent on our location and context, and is constantly evolving through our interaction with other people and the world. Our inner condition is in constant flux, constructed from memory, experience  and our willingness (or not) to conform to social expectation.

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Life is increasingly digital - experienced though a screen, second-hand - 'as if real life exists beyond the veil'. In an image saturated culture where we consume images without thinking, I believe painting can be an antidote to the noise of digital channels. The process of making my work has a meditative quality - a thousand small repetitive acts of contemplation. The painting becomes a repository of accrued time, thoughts and ideas. I hope that the paintings can provide a pause, a moment of meditative contemplation; a way of slowing down mass media’s pace of image consumption.

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Pippa Young graduated from Falmouth University in 2012 with a first class honours degree in fine art. Since then she has gone on to exhibit both nationally and internationally. She has had 10 solo shows as well as being selected for many prestigious group shows such as the John Ruskin Prize exhibition, Wells Contemporary and The Discerning Eye.

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