By Izzy Bilkus
When Katy Moran named her latest exhibition, ‘Let’s Get Some Air’, at Pippy Houldsworth gallery, it wasn’t just a nod to the pastoral surroundings of her Hertfordshire home. It was a quiet exhale that captures the spaciousness that defines her new work, rooted in intuition, openness and the kind of deliberate stillness that takes years to grow into.
This is Moran’s first solo show in London since a significant shift in her practice. Developing from the smaller, found framed supports that once grounded her work to stretched canvases on a far larger scale, her new paintings are both physically and emotionally broader. “For a long time, I didn’t want to make big paintings unless it was truly necessary,” Moran tells me. “But equally, I wanted to challenge myself and expand my practice. It was a burning feeling that came through so strongly and intuitively.”
After 15 years living and working in London, Moran relocated to the Hertfordshire countryside with her family. “When I moved from London, I noticed a big difference in the light. I’d never previously been influenced by the light or nature in my painting. You get these big expanses of land, which have quite a big effect on me – the sky, the clouds. I wanted a bigger studio and just a nicer quality of life.” She describes this transition in vivid, cinematic terms – like “the scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang where the car takes off and flies.” Driving out of the city, she recalls the sensation of the landscape suddenly opening up, of breathing more deeply, of feeling “like a battery-farmed chicken who’d just been set free in the wild.”
Walking through the countryside from her home to her studio, Moran found herself more attuned to seasonal shifts and while nature doesn’t necessarily appear in representational form, it comes through in her palette – muted greens, blues, airy pastels. “I remember I was driving one day and the clouds were so low that in that moment it felt like I could have got out of the car and climbed into them,” she recalls.
Moran’s new work bears this out. Take Indigo Moon, named after a piano piece she was learning during its creation. Using a squeegee, she spread inky swathes of paint across the canvas, letting diluted pigment pool and drift into one another. “I couldn’t get a bum mark big enough,” she jokes, referring to her use of her own body in other works, “so I used a squeegee instead.” The result is a medley of deep purples and ochres, layered with intention and accident alike.
That balance of control and abandon is key. “I’ve always been interested in a fresh and spontaneous energy,” she says. “I like a surprise that I haven’t planned for.” In this exhibition, these surprises are amplified across larger canvases, with ice-blue trickles in works like casajmg that cascade like frozen streams. Yet ‘Let’s Get Some Air’ isn’t just about looking outward. Moran has been practicing transcendental meditation for the past two years, seeking a stronger connection to her intuition – the compass she’s always trusted. “I was reading about this extreme mountain climber who relied on what he called ‘the voice’ that guided him through life-or-death climbs. And I thought, ‘how can you make decisions with such clarity?’ I wanted that.”
It’s in this inner space that much of ‘Let’s Get Some Air’ was conceived. Moran’s paintings may suggest landscapes or seascapes, and their surfaces buzz with associations, but they remain purposefully untethered.
Her paintings speak to each other across the gallery. “It’s almost like a relay race, and they’re passing the baton to each other,” Moran says. “I’ll have worked on something then left it for a while because I’m not sure what to do with it. Then I’ll go and answer that particular question in another painting. They’re all answering each other’s questions.” The result is a quiet cohesion across the exhibition – a resonance of decisions that feel almost musical.
Moran’s interest in sound and rhythm isn’t new – since practicing meditation, she has returned to childhood hobbies like playing the piano and competitive sport, and it’s no coincidence that Indigo Moon was both played and painted. “I’ve called quite a few of my paintings More Me. Sometimes a painting feels like it’s moving by itself and I’m just following it – in that way it seems like a kind of depersonalisation, but paradoxically, it’s so deeply personal because it’s coming from within me.”
Moran recalls the influence of Francis Bacon, especially his works from the 1970s, where accidental paint marks are corralled with pastel borders. “I resonated with that kind of conundrum: how do you retain the energy of the accident?”
Still, Moran’s intuition remains at the heart of everything she does. It’s a relationship she describes as mysterious, even mystical. “It’s like an inner engine.” That push and pull of the self and subconscious, control and freedom, accident and intention, is what gives her paintings their pulse. Ultimately, ‘Let’s Get Some Air’ is about opening up – studio walls, possibilities with paint, even lungs. “Your creativity is like your secret weapon,” Moran says. “And I think my secret weapon is my intuition.”
