John Hurrell – 6 August, 2015

There are two sorts of image construction being presented in this show of intricate watercolours by Georgie Hill. Both are extraordinarily delicate and complicated, but one is abstract, schematically diagrammatic - spurning figuration, and the other a system of overlaying images of Eileen Gray chairs, with grey marbling patterns, garish mottled jaguar-skin configurations and negative-spaced, rectangular tab structures that allude to fabric designs by Frances Hodgkins. (The two women apparently met.) Rippling exotic tropical rhythms dominate throughout. That only watercolour is incorporated in her technique is extraordinary.

Hill in the Gray chair works seems to be enjoying the dancing swaying forms for the vertiginous sensations they induce. Despite the precision and tightness of her execution, she is riffing for its own sake, generating a polyphonic pulse, a sense of exuberant abandonment, exalting in the cadences and shuffling arabesques that surround the elegant piece of furniture glowing in the centre - and upon which she might recline to take a breather.

The other variety of image is more overtly cerebral. It plays off very fine rigid lines with strangely precise splashes that regularly dissolve the looping rainbow grid of needlethin watercolour. These delicate linear configurations - akin to beads on a thread - either accompany (like an adjacent suspended curtain) or frame a small vertical rectangle, one with its top half a monochromatic lemon yellow, and a bottom half of dissolving organic topographies. Some of her thin lines splay out as if pointers to sections of coloured motion unlabelled as yet, but awaiting classification in the future.

These works are quite different from Hill‘s earlier planar depictions of rooms as symbols of private interiority. They tend to flirt more overtly with layered (but fastidiously jumbled) chaos surrounding the furniture (paisley patterns floating free of the walls), and with the beaded lines and hovering planes, have a calming stasis.

John Hurrell

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