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INSIGHT: Week 8 | Aimée Parrott
5-11 August -
INSIGHT IS A NEW ONLINE PLATFORM PRESENTED BY PIPPY HOULDSWORTH GALLERY, DEBUTING WORK BY A DIFFERENT ARTIST EACH WEEK. NEW WORK MADE DURING LOCKDOWN WILL BE HIGHLIGHTED ALONGSIDE A short VIDEO PRESENTED BY THE ARTIST.
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INSIGHT: WEEK 8 | aimée parrott
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Aimée Parrott's practice encompasses painting, printing, sculpture, artist books, murals and installation. The artist's understanding of painting, her primary medium, informs the ideas expressed throughout her practice as whole. Approaching the canvas as a fragile and permeable boundary - a metaphorical skin or body that holds the trace of time, thought and gesture - Parrott explores notions of transformation, connectivity and exchange.
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Aimée Parrott's new paintings explore ecology, geology and human relationships to nature, focusing on conceptions of hybridity and transformation. These ideas are reflected in the multiple processes and media that shift towards sculpture, collage, and drawing to probe the limits of painting. This new body of work adopts the technique of monotype printing to incorporate spontaneity, fluidity and an element of chance into a singular image.
MATRIX, 2020
ink on calico, acrylic, polymer clay, pins, thread, sapele and ply frame
42 x 32 cm, 16 1/2 x 12 5/8 in£2,500.00 (ex tax) -
'The material presence of a painting, its fragility and yet density – its sense of layered time which benefits from a long slow look in order to unfold – is in contrast to the slipperiness of the sanitised, disembodied image on a screen hastily scrolled through'.
Aimée Parrott in conversation with Basil Beatty RA, Royal Academy Magazine, 2016
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The artist applies paint freely onto the matrix, fixing the work only at the moment of printing. This process leaves a trace on the copper plate, a ghost of the previous work that Parrott, at times, chooses to keep as an under-layer that informs the next. By working in this way, she introduces seriality and repetition into her practice - a reverberation between the works themselves.
mouth, 2020
ink on calico, acrylic, thread, sapele and ply frame
32 x 42 cm, 12 5/8 x 16 1/2 in
£2,500.00 (ex tax) -
'[Parrott] makes connections between microbial and galactic, human and non-human, and gives painting a voice in the ecological discussions of today.'
Figgy Guyver, Frieze, 2018
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Seriality and repetition are echoed in her imagery as recurring forms stretch between micro and macro scales, shifting from abstraction to figuration. The shapes of shells, mouths, cells, planets, plants and holes evolve to form new relationships with each other, fluctuating between part and whole. Once the initial image is formed Parrott continues to transform the painting, often by embroidering the surface, extending the support, or attaching clay elements. These additional media create seams or junctures, points of transition between image and object.
HULL, 2020
ink on calico, acrylic, thread, sapele and ply frame
32 x 42 cm, 12 5/8 x 16 1/2 in
£2,500.00 (ex tax) -
'Looking at Aimée Parrott’s […] paintings I think about this impulse to think through the hands and feel through the eyes. To put herself up against the edges of things that surround her. In a world governed by information and data, these paintings look to establish a connection between the hands and the lips, translating the textural nature of speech into the gestural language of paint.'
George Vasey, The Weight of a Pigment (On the work of Aimée Parrott), 2016
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'I don’t want to shift completely to figuration; I want to keep the play between the two. I really like the openness of abstraction, the associations keep rolling. Once you make something that looks like something or is nameable it can become slightly more direct or closed.'
Aimée Parrott, The Studio, Royal Academy, 2016
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'To stand before one work is to imagine it alone, a frozen temporality requiring a further inspection, a little dip if you must, in its pools of ink and dye.'
Skye Arundhati Thomas, this is tomorrow, 2016
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About Aimée Parrott
British artist, Aimée Parrot, graduated from University College Falmouth in 2009 with a BA in Fine Art and in 2014 received a Post Graduate Diploma from the Royal Academy, London. Recent solo exhibitions include those at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2018); Trade Gallery, Nottingham (2018) and Breese Little, London (2016). In 2015 Pippy Houldsworth Gallery presented a two-person show, Soaked, Not Resting, with Parrot and Color Field exponent, Helen Frankenthaler. The exhibition examined the ways in which the two artists negotiate the picture plane, looking in particular at both artists' deployment of staining. Her work has also been included in exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Stadtgalerie Bamberg - Villa Dessauer, Bamberg; Hastings Contemporary, Hastings; Platform Foundation, London and Exeter Phoenix, Exeter. Awards include first prize in the Exeter Contemporary Open (2017) and the Dentons Art Prize (2016). In 2019 Parrott curated All That the Rain Promises and More, for the Edinburgh Arts Festival, hosted by Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Broadway Gallery, Letchworth (2020) and Mackintosh Lane, London (2021). Parrott has been selected to participate in Villa Lena Foundation's residency programme (2021).
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'Primarily I think about painting as a way of being in contact with the world. I find it useful to approach the surface of a painting as a metaphorical skin, a permeable barrier. I am interested in the notion that a work of art can bridge the gap between an internal reality and an external one, that it can be a physical manifestation and a translation of experience.'
Aimée Parrott, Dais Contemporary, 2016
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Press
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Frieze
26 July 2019Seven Highlights from the Edinburgh Art Festival. By Figgy Guyver
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Frieze
30 May 2018Critics Guide to London: The Best Shows in Town. By Figgy Guyver
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The Art Newspaper
30 April 2018Private view: our pick of May gallery shows. By James H. Miller
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Royal Academy Magazine
17 November 2016How do painters from different generations see Abstract Expressionism today? Two RA Schools alumni, Basil Beattie RA and Aimée Parrott, met in the Academy’s show to discuss the movement’s enduring influence.
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this is tomorrow
21 November 2016Review by Skye Arundhati Thomas
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The Studio, Royal Academy Schools
Autumn 2016Aimée Parrott interviewed by Jonathan Stubbs.
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Dais Contemporary
2016Interview with Aimée Parrott
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Artsy
28 January 2015In Duet, Frankenthaler and Parrott show the Past and Future of Stain Painting. By Stephen Dillon
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Royal Academy Magazine
23 January 2015RA recommends. By Sam Phillips
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