The Park Sarah Pickstone 24.04.04-30.05.04 Private View: 23 April 2004, 7.00-9.00 pm Are you in your dress shoes or your wellingtons when you imagine walking through an urban park? These spaces have about them an other-worldliness which is radically contingent rather than transcendental they are liminal spaces. Offered as palliation for the claustrophobic circumstances of contemporary urban life or meeting places, areas of respite within a surrounding urban "wilderness" they evoke fear, ambivalence, pleasure and joy in equal measure. The behaviour they elicit in us as adults is ambivalent. As children when the edges of the known (world) seem much closer to ones person, parks seem vast and magical spaces of freedom from hard edges. Rules & boundaries blur. The work in The Park takes as its starting point one such urban space. Pickstone's large scale paintings clad the walls of the gallery. Their abstracted, fragmentary nature invokes here the tendency towards objectifying surface at the expense of depth and there an absence as she re-figures the codes of occupying or mapping presence. In these paintings she attempts to bring/harness the figures and forces (gestures) of things and milieux -- an ambient intellectual and environmental syrrhesis (flowing together) -- These figures play in the dust of the Self ...what is left behind once we have made our excursion...flattened grass, litter, broken branches, torn flowers...seemingly before the emergence of the Ego.
	The gallery is open Thursday to Sunday 12 - 6pm or by appointment. For further information please call Sheila Lawson on 020 7375 2973.
	To view images of the exhibition click on the arrow to the right.