mabel Pope
Entangled in curiosity and stitched together with care, my practice is rooted in the everyday. It celebrates the whimsy and magic in the in between and the overlooked. I have just completed my final year at the Glasgow School of Art studying Painting and printmaking. I consider myself a landscape painter and my paintings as postcards, mementos of fleeting moments and documentation of the turbulence of everyday life. I am drawn to the acts of crafting, preserving, collecting and reusing, prolonging the lives of objects or moments and sharing them with others. My love of cooking fuels my art practice. For me, painting and cooking are intertwined as food, like art, acts as a vessel for stories. Inspired by my family’s vegetable garden in Herefordshire, I have borrowed compositions from community gardens and allotments in Glasgow, as a way to stay connected to the land and the seasons while living in the city. I am inspired by plants and their application to ornament, noticing the lyrical rhythms in their tangled leaves.
My degree show was a celebration of the seasons and my surroundings; of memories, dreams and the world around me. I painted the abundance of Autumn, the darkness of Glasgow’s winter and nostalgic scenes, reminiscing last summer’s adventures in the countryside. I used wooden cutout paintings to engage the viewer and encourage them to look. My paintings often start off with a drawing expedition, sketchbook and fountain pen in hand. I draw what I see, spending a lot of time wandering and wondering, watching the seasons change and the birds swoop and soar, noticing shadows as objects imprint themselves on others. Then, I take the drawings back to the studio and merge different compositions together in paint, imagining what takes place in the spaces between and integrating elements of old photographs or images from cookbooks. I use intuition and tone to abstract the familiar.
My practice has become a patchwork quilt of my surroundings; the simplicity, abundance and quiet beauty of it all. It represents the limbo state of not knowing, of trying to stay present and navigating busy life. I want to encourage the viewer to notice more and immerse them in imagery, in a world that only I have viewed, my own.