The Shape of Shape
7/11/24 – 10/11/24
Split Gallery, London, E2 OPG

Dora Padfield, Chloe Beddow, Flow Bracey, Gabriella Day, Graham Lister, Jameela Gordon-King, Liv Fox, Nancy Pilkington, Purdey Williams, Rowan Bazley, Scarlet Topley, Tanith Mab

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I was invited to contribute a work built upon the writings of Amy Stillman for this exhibition, which was curated by former undergraduate student, Rowan Bazley. The exhibition featured a number of recent GSA graduates, whose work all related to the ways in which artists control/ don’t control shapes as they make.

The work included was a modest oil painting titled ‘Shape-Up or Get Out’. The title itself references the idea that to ‘shape-up’ is to modify and correct behaviour. In common parlance this is understandable, but equally, what does it really mean to shape-up? What is a ‘correct’ shape? What is the form of ‘correct’ behaviours and how is this related to the drawing and painting of shapes? These are questions that I ask within my painting practice … thinking about how the works I make within iterative and repeated making processes are often about modifying, adjusting and, in essence ‘correcting’ the shapes and marks applied to surfaces.

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This painting is the result of a period of conducting studio investigations specifically connected to my ongoing research questions, which have been more fully and explicitly articulated over 2025.

In what ways do specific repetitive and process-driven mark-making strategies foreground and challenge the meditative, durational aspects of artistic production?

How does the strategy of employing iterative mark-making techniques allow for exploration of persistence, variation and error within painting, and what does this reveal about the role of process in contemporary abstraction?
- Definitions of durational looking and the pensive gaze
- Definitions of what I see to be core elements of contemporary abstraction (persistence, variation and error)
- Why process is especially important in contemporary abstraction

Shape Up of Get Out was developed after numerous iterative paintings, each of which gradually simplified and distilled a gestural mark in a sketchbook. Through this process, the tactility, spontaneity and ideas of control were investigated, as information was lost or as decisions to further abstract the shape were made. The work seeks to choreograph a viewing experience - inviting different types of views of pigment, of substrate and of the 'in-between' washes of paint to each vie for attention. This is important for contemporary abstraction because it gives rise to a longer, non-scrollable viewing experience.