Page 3 - Sharon Hall: Meeting Points

Studio Visit

Hall has a strange relation to exactitude, as always. Her intuitive use of risk and
knowledge, as well as her continuing contrary fight against visual logic, creates
a sense of progression in terms of decisions made during the working process.
Instead of producing an iconic image, however, Hall waits for accumulative effect,
or effects, to work, just about. Such an approach to time, allows the irregular
broken triangle to exist, with the artist still wondering if this might work. Working
within the apparent confines of physical space, the artist, does break out at times,
with the stretcher and recent watercolours, for instance, mimicking an extended
cinema screen that curves away from us.

While there is something calming about the artist being openly present in the work
the rationale of language soon breaks down, nonetheless. While a certain type
of hard-edged painting will try to deny the fallible nature of hand or fact, even the
masking tape here helps to act as supporter of process rather than hidden compo -
nent of artifice. Hall indulges lightly in a build-up of intelligent, non-volumetric
areas of soft, diffuse, sometimes powdery colour, that seem to go beneath or
become part of the surface. At times the paint appears to be no more than a deli -
cately expanded stain or filter. Moving through, however, apparently quest ioning
the situation, Hall renders another area strangely opaque. The undeliberate
surface of the green triangle, for instance, which sits awkwardly in front, with the
‘used’ or ‘found’ colour absorbed in the surface next door, forces the eye to adjust
to differing circumstances. Hovering or sitting on top, the opaque section almost
mimics the faux nature of the whole endeavour. Hall remains somewhat anti
expressive in her use of paint. She has, for decades, been making independent
work which deals openly with received ideas of language, reproduction, and the
huge gamut of expectation and association that comes with visual language.

Each and any real image lies in the role that is more tantalisingly fact than illusion,
starting with a number of decisions made ‘as I go along’, Hall utilises an open-
ended pull of precarity. A matter of finding where things might seem to surprise
or confuse, in each imbedded, complete painting seems to render the familiar
unfam iliar, or the other way round. While Hall’s apparently contrary notions might
suggest a campaign of extensive wrong-footing, this is not the point. Pink and
yellow, so deep but filling the space, start to represent a state where colour
is nothing other than what it is. Suggestive of a place that exists in much earlier
painting, the work creates a strong sense of actual existence. Odd things
do happen, and things are able to remain still, in a fixed state, perhaps.

Sacha Craddock April 2024