Gill Ord: Stages and Flakes

2 Oct-26 Oct 2025

Overview

In work made during residencies on either side of the Atlantic (Joya: AiR Almeria, Spain and Pouch Cove Foundation, Newfoundland, Canada) Ord's response to the landscape unites her practice across that vast distance. Work done in a residency usually has an audience of one - a diaristic communication between the artist and their environment. Here we are privileged to witness a journey, a sometimes vulnerable moment in an artist's work. Two prior paintings set out the parameters that the landscape then challenges.

For a painter her response to the observed world is direct. Far from the comfort of her studio, Ord acts as an intermediary, almost a shaman to reveal something of the genius loci. Habits are interrupted, re-worked, not as an end in themselves but as a re-shaping of her practice.

The show takes its name from the haphazard yet practical buildings and structures built and re-built each year on the Newfoundland coast, a constant renewal. Sketching using twigs found on site in a kind of divination, the landscape materialises on paper. The body is let loose, the horizon speaks. Gestures that in the studio would be circumscribed by self-awareness and self-censorship and be a more conscious exercise, are here quite raw and even endangered by the environment (the cold, the heat, the dis/comfort of new situations). The landscape is translated to paper in a struggle between the unconscious and the willed.

Plein air – here the limitations are embraced as qualities. Later, back on familiar ground they may be worked into new paintings but there is yet no final result within sight. The huge distance from that plein air and the studio is the galvanising element. The unfamiliar, the insecurity is the spur.

This is mimetic magic, much is put in trust to the artist: Ord repays it.