exhibitions // art writing // profile// contact // home

For something to exist in space it must first move through time. Lily Hibberd's work is concerned with the dynamics and interplay of spatial and temporal relations and the capacity of paint to engage as cinema does with psychological space. Inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's film Rebecca, Hibberd's work Approach 2001 is based on the final dramatic sequence when the male protagonist Maxim approaches his burining mansion estate. Approach comprises seven panels depicting a house burning in the distance. With the movement across each panel the house becomes closer and more finite in its definition. The pictorial size of the subject, however, remains the same even though the panels dramatically decrease in size so that the shifts across them can be read metaphorically like a lens of a camera periodically tightening its focus: each movement depicts a change in time and spatial orientation.

Essay for this exhibition



The spectator is involved in the unfolding of this narrative-type sequence, in its scale, structure, pictorial size and mutable perspectives. These elements mirror cinematic devices that entice the viewer into considering comparisons and repetitions amid passing moments in time (or in this case between the canvas or frames before and after). As the images visually amass the viewer is ultimately enfolded in a drama, enacted by the bright seductive colour of the work, by the very nature of the subject matter and in the work's clear undulating manipulation of space - where physical, psychological and perceptual space(s) collide.

Extract catalogue essay, LookSee: five contemporary painters

Natasha Bullock © 2001