Kitty Horton’s artworks often explore the materiality of oils, mixed media, ceramics and drawing as primary mediums in her visual art practice. Inspired by the American Minimalists, Kitty investigates her surroundings by creating distorted shapes, forms and motifs. Mark-making and the lucky accident extend the relationship between painting and drawing. Kitty has recently engaged with spatial configurations of interior objects to provide compositional structures. The mediums of drawing, ceramics and painting enable Kitty to investigate further the hard and soft duality of opposing, sometimes complimentary, interior forms.
‘LINEAGE’
Through complex layering of hues and an encyclopaedic array of graphic and iconographic mark-making, Horton’s painting continues to arrive at a state of graceful, seamless equilibrium. She makes this appear effortless, however this attainment of a certain type of formal balanced synthesis, requires a finely calibrated know-how of how parts present, relate to or negate one another. Attaining this ideal calibration within composition, usually means the work ‘lands’ within a specific spectrum of tension. In Horton’s work, this finessed accomplishment, singles her out as an adept and inspired painter.
What else is essential to painting? In this body of work Kitty is also presenting us with a re-examination of both frame [demarcations of space] and surface — the very mechanics of pictorial convention. Here we encounter confidently rendered mid to large scale abstractions countered with a type of asymmetric smaller-scale plywood wall constructions; as well as multi-media assemblage. At this locus, Horton has deliberately chosen a more spatial route toward painting.
One may ask, are these crudely hewed-together wall constructions some type of remnants of painting stretchers or building supports? One thing is certain, these constructions certainly emphasise the object-ness of painting. Because make no mistake, this is an exhibition of painting and a clear distinction is being drawn: two approaches to painting appear locked into a battle for supremacy – one championing the abstracted image (representation) the other: the object.
Which will triumph? And is this important at the end of the day? Of course, this idea that painting can move beyond two dimensions, beyond its material origins and beyond its dependence upon the easel, are not new. They were first explored in the early twentieth-century, particularly in the Russian avant-garde, and specifically the Suprematism movement. These ideas were then further explored through the later Cubism movement, further refined during the 1960s Conceptualism and Minimalist movements, and more recently, as it occurs here, through Kitty’s incremental headway toward what has been characterised as painting in the expanded field. In numerous conversations with the artist over the years, as well as concrete signification within her work, Kitty has always recognised the import of these Western [canon] progenitors.
What is significant, contemporaneously, is Horton’s ability to bring these different approaches to painting — together — the formal and the expanded — in one exhibition, in a form of hybridised tension. Both approaches represent something becoming and something remembered. For it was also Kitty’s late father, a skilled builder, in his workshop, where some of Kitty’s earliest fondest memories reside. She recalls, in her father’s company, often picking up his myriad tools, attempting to mimic his building processes. Even at this early age then — this discovery of knowledge through applied practice [what artists’ do] proves instinctual/ fundamental. Getting the tension just right, this exhibition is a sure bet: works redolent with fragile, lapsed geometries — yes, but conceived through a resolute and resounding strength.
— Dr Camilla Cassidy
