‘Becoming and Going // 来来去去 (lái lái qù qù)’ - recent work by Ginny Elston
Monday 6th January - Saturday 8th February 2020
Open: Monday - Friday, 9am - 4.30pm
Private View: Friday 10th January 2020, 5pm - 7pm
About the Exhibition:
Scottish artist Ginny Elston presents a series of paintings and objects made during her time working and teaching in China, in a new exhibition ‘Becoming and Going // 来来去去 (lái lái qù qù)’.
Taking New Materialist perspectives, Buddhist Philosophy and Object-Oriented Ontology as theoretical frameworks for her research, Ginny is interested in how certain elements or ideas of an artwork always withdraw, or withhold themselves, from us.
The sacredness of specific Chinese landscapes and the mountain’s symbolic potential become vehicles through which the artist examines concepts of knowledge, truth and reality. Inspired by colourful Shu embroidery patterns and bright, intricate artworks found in Buddhist temples and monasteries, the artist combines different material languages of paint, silk and thread in her works. Through this process, she interweaves notions of belonging, secrecy and accessibility as a stranger in the strange lands of China and Scotland.
About the Artist:
Ginny graduated from the University of Manchester with a BA (Hons) in History of Art and French in 2010. She joined the School’s Foundation Course in the same year, and completed two years of the Painting Course. She went on to gain her MFA in Fine Arts and Humanities at the University of Dundee in 2016, winning the Vanessa Bell Prize and the MFA Arts and Humanities Prize.
Ginny has taught drawing, painting and printmaking at the School as a Visiting Tutor since 2013. She was artist in residence at Edinburgh Academy during 2013 to 2014, and has taught with the Edinburgh International Festival and the Edinburgh Drawing School. Most recently, she was Foundation Year Programme Leader at the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts, China, from 2018 to 2019.
Ginny’s art practice is concerned with language and the materiality of paint, ontological philosophies and the spaces in and around paintings. Her work seeks to stage new experiences of space, by pushing and pulling flat geometric patterns and shapes through depictions of her environment. The introduction of these varying signs, symbols, colours and languages open up a different dimension of shifting representations.
Ginny is currently working as Tutor (maternity cover), teaching both the Monday Afternoon and Evening Drawing & Painting the Figure courses at the School, and continues to run regular Weekend Workshops and week-long Summer School courses.