About the exhibition
Synaesthetic at the Beaux Arts Gallery, Bath, was my first solo show in the Georgian city, and a second opportunity to show work alongside my friend Anna Gillespie's sculpture, after our Coda on Cork Street show.
Gallery director Aidan Quinn allowed me to populate every room, upstairs and down, with a broad collection of work, including a 2.4m high Torsion piece in the large first floor gallery.
Aidan has written a beautiful piece about the work, which was published in the exhibition catalogue. It's available to read in full here, and I've also included a short passage from the text below.
Work in situ
Synaesthetic, foreword by Aidan Quinn
Synaesthesia, suggested by the title, refers in this case to the psychological experience of experiencing music as colour, suggesting perhaps a similarity in the way modern compositions by Philip Glass (in a piece such as ‘Openings’), Steve Reich or Arvo Pärt, say, are constructed - an underlying basic arrangement with layers of detail gradually laid on top to create a strangely moving and complete whole.
The drawings also echo the meandering motifs of the Safavid mosques of Isfahan, or the polychromatic configurations one might associate with psychedelia, or a child’s kaleidoscope toy. At times in awe of the Fibonacci sequence, the inspiration may be more prosaic, like the sliver of colour in a child’s marble that forms the basis of ‘Flow’.
Is using a computer to draw actually drawing? Is eschewing the use of computers luddite? Computers, especially the Apple computer, have been crucial to Elliott since he came across the mark one version in the mid 1980s (he was among the first group of people in this country to do so). For Elliott drawing may refer to the micro processes of building, refining, repeating, altering, etc. as much as actually applying marks on paper by hand.
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Link here to read the full text ⟶
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Aidan Quinn, Beaux Arts Gallery
Link to exhibited works
