Recent Paintings, by Allison Gildersleeve is a vigorous exploration of the interaction of time, memory and loss. As visual encapsulations of Wordsworth’s definition of poetry – “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recalled in tranquility” – the images in the exhibition are derived from the artist’s childhood home and the surrounding landscape. The paintings and drawings are Gildersleeve’s way of uncovering and recovering stories of her past and engaging them in a dialogue with the present.

Commenting on her work, the artist has written:

When the logical progression through time and space is hijacked by memory, there is a certain collapse of what was there, and out of this disintegration, a third distinct place emerges as a physical presence. My work pieces together this place, combining the familiar with the unfamiliar, the past and the present. What results is a hedge inside a room, a table leg in between branches, an armchair sitting inside a deserted pool. Space is restructured by the emotions it houses and what might have been a linear internal narrative becomes a topography of recollection, uncertainty, loss, and retelling.