Gallery 2

Di Broomhall

Friday 21 January - 6 Sunday February 2022

Always the books to hand are important in Di Broomhall’s practice both as a reference for testing ideas and as potential for new insights. This body of work arose at a time when questions about abstraction supported by Bridget Riley’s book The Eye’s Mind were circulating in my practice space.

In 2020 Broomhall took this idea of ‘making space’ as a starting point for small studies and later developed a body of large works. During lockdown freedom to move beyond certain defined boundaries was limited and her work space was very small so she started with small pencil and watercolour studies in reduction as a reflection of the external limits. Looking at her immediate surroundings of interior and garden Broomhall’s works explorate on three straight lines upwards, three straight lines across, overlapped, floated within the borders of the page, and an unlimited palette. These studies as a meditation on time “each day the same yet not the same” were referencing geometry, sensation, space, weather, light and the garden. Each of these small works was completed in a sitting however long that took.

From these studies Broomhall became interested in making expansive space with a body of large abstract works, which traced movement and time, distilled colour and atmosphere, and which created space and connection.

Interplay is an exploration into making space out of scale, colour and line. Broomhall further used two colours, cadmium red and ultramarine blue, their black and neutral greys, and white.

The interplay between these elements form an active abstract dialogue concerning the dynamics of proximity of colour and the effect this has both internally within the canvas and on the ephemeral space the work occupies.

𝙄𝙉𝙏𝙀𝙍𝙋𝙇𝘼𝙔 /January 21, 2022 by Kirrily Jordan