Overview
Opening reception: Friday 11 September, 6–8pm
Pilar Corrias is pleased to present The Feeling of What Happens, Mary Ramsden's seventh solo exhibition with the gallery.
This new body of work approaches painting as a form of enquiry into consciousness. Rather than using painting to represent the world, Ramsden treats the act of painting as a way for the mind to reflect on itself, an endeavour once likened to "trying to bite your own teeth."
Opening reception: Friday 11 September, 6–8pm
Pilar Corrias is pleased to present The Feeling of What Happens, Mary Ramsden's seventh solo exhibition with the gallery.
This new body of work approaches painting as a form of enquiry into consciousness. Rather than using painting to represent the world, Ramsden treats the act of painting as a way for the mind to reflect on itself, an endeavour once likened to "trying to bite your own teeth."
Influenced by the philosophy of idealism, Ramsden views consciousness as the fundamental foundation of reality, one that can be more fully understood through the body than through thought alone. Painting becomes the practice of thinking through sensation.
The paintings do not aim to express autobiography but work to translate embodied states of attention through intuition and response. At a moment when images can increasingly be generated without human experience, Ramsden's practice foregrounds the physical act of making. The process and integral decisions remain apparent offering a lens through which to consider what it is that remains uniquely human about painting.
Based in rural North Yorkshire, Ramsden's studio is surrounded by dales, rivers and moorland. Though rarely represented directly, the investigation into consciousness helps to make sense of the recursive nature of the memory of forms that become embedded in the mind and resurface on the canvas.
Together, these overlapping studies of consciousness, feeling and perception situate Ramsden's practice within a broader history of abstraction. In dialogue with artists such as Hilma af Klint, Agnes Martin and Wassily Kandinsky, her paintings explore how abstraction can give form to ways of knowing and perceiving that exist beyond language and direct representation.
Over the past year Ramsden has engaged in a rigorous dialogue with scientist, professor Brian Swimme. This exchange of ideas has provided a generative back and forth for the artist and a text with selected notes from this conversation will be available during the run of the show.
