Geoff Diego Litherland – Catching Matter
Unborn Pulses
5 May–16 July 2022
Thursday–Saturday, 9–5pm
or by appointment
Free entry, no booking required, everyone welcome
This new body of work continues artist Geoff Litherland’s interest in using the slow, traditional materials and craft techniques of western painting to create a connection between himself and the natural environment.
In recent years (and in collaboration with his partner and weaver Angharad McLaren), Litherland has grown flax and used it to weave canvasses with highly complex woven patterns upon which to paint. Concurrent to this the artist learned to mix and use traditional lime mortars and plasters as part of various house renovation projects.
Using some of the leftover flax toe in the lime plasters to strengthen them – in the same way that animal-hair had been historically – Litherland found a tactility and necessary slowness to the processes of using these traditional materials.
During this exploration of material and process the artist realised that he was beginning to use the materials of buon fresco, translated as ‘true fresh’, the traditional painting technique that pre-dates oil painting on linen.
The technique of buon fresco only allows a short window of time where pigment may be added to the wet plaster. When applied correctly, the finely powdered pigment effectively impregnates itself within the surface of the plaster.
The lime-plaster works are process-led, using building materials and tools. There is no use of paintbrushes or gestures, nor the focus to engage in that language. Litherland’s purposeful removal of that language from the act of creation, allows the artist’s involvement and use of materials to act as a more effective conduit for the processes and metaphors the work explores.
The work provides an opportunity for Litherland to explore different materials – pigments, sand and lime – and their historical relationship to his locality of the Derbyshire Dales, where these materials have been extracted from the landscape for centuries.
Litherland enjoys the contradictions inherent in what a material depicts – in using lime plasters, one is effectively creating reconstituted rock. The artist then asks, ‘what if I were to depict something light and airy onto these hard surfaces?’
Distorted grids are made by casting hemp nets over the wet plaster and allowing the pigments to fall onto and through them to create drifts on the surface of the work. Meteorite pigment was used to create the dark crater spots on the surfaces.
These works attempt to capture the ethereal and ephemeral qualities of that which makes up the emptiness of space. Using earth-based pigments in these compositions creates a built-in, metaphorical meaning of interconnectedness.
‘We now know that empty space is full of matter that resonates at different frequencies to solid things. There are always things out there in the ether, floating about, things falling from the sky.’
Spaceship Earth – Ghosts Keep Me Alive
2015
Oil on English Flax
150 x 150 cm
About the artist:
Geoff Diego Litherland was born in Mexico and is currently based in Wirksworth, Derbyshire. In 2012 he completed an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University of London, he is an artist with a considerable exhibition profile, a part-time lecturer at Nottingham Trent University and co-director of Haarlem Artspace.
The Spaces Between
Oil on English Flax