…and thence we came forth to see again the stars.
Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy – Inferno XXXIV, 139
Gillian Lawler’s solo exhibition Edgelands revisits her interest in liminal space, a threshold through which an imagined reality as opposed to an actual reality is explored and embodies a tension that Lawler deftly explores in her new body of work.
Her primary source of inspiration lies in the existing edge lands and wastelands that populate our surroundings. These overlooked and marginalised spaces, often neglected or dismissed in conventional urban narratives, become the focal point of Lawler’s artistic exploration. Through her keen observation and sensitive interpretation, she breathes new life into these forgotten realms, revealing their hidden potential and significance.
Lawler’s artwork resonates with a sense of duality and transformation. Her pieces capture the interplay between decay and renewal, the ephemeral and the tangible, and the past and the future. Each painting represents shifting landscapes which act as a portal, allowing visitors to traverse the boundaries between worlds and evocative atmospheres of the ‘edgelands’.
Gillian Lawler invites us to contemplate the complexities of territories and boundaries. Through her artistic lens, she reveals the profound connections between these transitional spaces and our human condition. The exhibition serves as a reminder that liminal areas can provide fertile ground for growth, imagination, and metamorphosis. By shedding light on the intrinsic beauty and potential of these often-neglected landscapes, Lawler encourages us to reflect on the transitory nature of our existence.
Developing from previous exhibitions, she takes a step forward and explores this unconscious realm, inviting the viewer to join her expedition to unknown lands. Her ‘edgelands’ resemble mountains, raised borders from a floating ground elevating towards a foggy sky and transforming spaces in a state of constant flux, imbued with uncertainty. Lawler masterfully reduces and simplifies elements within these landscapes, creating a perspective of nature that is reconstructed as a series of indefinite structures. Lawler’s ‘edgelands’ serve as enigmatic portals, blurring the boundaries between the physical and the conceptual. They evoke a sense of the sublime, inviting contemplation of our place within the natural world and the intangible forces that shape our experiences. The mountain-like forms, elevated and detached from the earthly plane, act as signifiers of the thresholds we encounter on our journey through life.
The artist’s deliberate reduction and simplification of elements within her landscapes serve to distil the essence of nature itself. By stripping away extraneous details, Lawler enables viewers to focus on the fundamental aspects of these conceptual visions. This reduction not only enhances the aesthetic appeal of the artworks, but also prompts deeper reflections on the nature of reality and our perception of it.
Lawler’s constructions of indefinite structures within the ‘edgelands’ evoke a sense of transience and impermanence. These ethereal landscapes become metaphors for the fluidity of existence, where boundaries and definitions become malleable. The artist’s intentional manipulation of space and form challenges viewers to immerse themselves in Lawler’s evocative landscapes, they are transported to a realm where time is suspended and traditional notions of space are
reimagined. In this state of ambiguity, the artist invites contemplation of the interconnectedness of all things and the vastness of the universe that extends beyond our comprehension.
By creating landscapes that are simultaneously familiar and otherworldly, the artist invites us to engage with the profound mysteries that lie at the edge of our perception. She reconstructs nature into conceptual visions inviting us to reconsider our preconceived notions, challenging
conventional boundaries, and embracing the infinite possibilities that lie within the realms of the unknown. Stepping into the awe-inspiring world of Edgelands she reveals the transformative power of art to expand our perspectives and illuminate the hidden wonders that surround us.
Elements of Lawler’s visual language reveal her perception of this world: an overlapping and intertwining of realities, sequences of shapes that glow within misty atmospheres and wrap the floating elements in a veil of secrecy. Through these elements, she suggests a path to travel to and climb the peaks of a surreal continent which is invisible and inaccessible to the outside world, and can only be perceived by the training of an inner knowledge. Her paintings open access to a new vision, a sidelight on painting as an entrance to unexplored and unconventional mind-sets.
The theme of a portal allowing travel across dimensions is extensively explored through literary, philosophical lenses, and visual art but the allure of Lawler’s paintings is used here to mean the accomplishment of knowledge in action. Throughout her art, she is finding her way into the lower regions through the memory and experience of what she has seen in the past. It is easier for the unconscious to understand the language of dreams and memories than that of rationality.
Nowadays, we are too used to relying on the rational mind, a corporeal existence which is excluding everything inexplicable and risking to forget the beauty of living a freer existence. Lawler’s oeuvre seamlessly and effortlessly weaves together the worlds of art, a confined social structure, and things we can only touch with an open heart and mind as she does.
This transformation of consciousness demonstrates the strong relationship between the plant, human, animal, and mechanical world. Her interest in these forces, blended with other aspects of life, greatly influence her paintings and become expressive resting places within the limits of the natural and supernatural. Her work evokes a sense of otherworldliness which is so characteristic of the surrealist movement: confined spaces, achieving a sense of isolation.
Lawler’s paintings are a mix of multi-layered interactions of belief, ecology, technology, and human emotion in suspended time and of an inhospitable wasteland. ‘Edgelands’ as a body of work is a digression of experience, an investigation of the nature of life since she is revealing within her use of translucent colours the metamorphosis of life, a perpetual cycle of energies that are released in her fleshy paintings. The geometry of her patterns finds their roots in the study of nature, and they move the artist as well as the observer from different planes of existence to the subconscious just as sacred geometry and holy mountains have in common the elevation of the spirit.
There are many examples of historically important mountains across the world, from the most famous Hellenistic Mount Olympus to the Genesis Mount Ararat passing through the Sacred Mountains of Europe. These mountains represented a destination for all pilgrims with the aim to mountaineer and elevate their spirits in order to achieve spiritual bliss. In the more recent past, Mount Monescia in the Swiss Alps is a mountain where a community of artists, anarchists, philosophers and thinkers settled on its slopes, later renaming it Monte Verità. This Swiss mountain community, with one of its most famous residents being Carl Gustav Jung, explored aspects of psychology and alchemy. Alchemy, as a progressing and revealing process, an introspective journey into ourselves, asks us to free ourselves from the prison of our narrowed minds – claustrophobic and technologically sophisticated lives to reveal a vivid and full existence.
Gillian Lawler encourages us to embrace the transformative power of transition, illuminating the profound beauty that lies within the borders of the unknown. Stepping into the threshold of ‘edgelands’ and embark on a journey that challenges preconceived notions, expands horizons, and invites us to see the world with fresh eyes. She makes visible in her paintings that which is invisible, and she does this by revealing a doorway through which we are invited to cross in order to find a place where the material becomes pure thought, entering a quiet and safe space without the chaotic distractions of our lives and to experience an existential inner world not unlike the ascension of a mountain where like an alchemist “real life awaits us.”