JASPER WINN | WRITER | SLOW ADVENTURER
JASPER WINN | WRITER | SLOW ADVENTURER
In taking apart the everything she sees, Pike's work turns dismantling and rebuilding into a dangerous vision. Breaking complex things, beings, landscapes and emotions into stark lines and blocks of colour then reassembling and rearranging this simplified, powerful vocabulary of shade and shape so things are made again into what they were before but in a different form. Or look the same but are something new.
Pike's paintings and assemblages render surprising the inner dynamics of a chair; expose the unsuspected forces packed and moving within a swimmer; unpick love, desire and joy; explain the sea where it runs against and over the land.
There's a fearlessness in this art. To take things apart is dangerous work, as in bomb disposal or surgery. The risk run that the parts that make up the whole of our world and experience won't go together again. Or having gone together won't work.
So, watching the process of playing, creating, fumbling and building with these basic elements is also a fearful thing. The laying out of parts, the forces re-imagined as colours, the shape of things; all show that existence and objects and we ourselves are one; driven and held dynamic by the same energies; driven by tightly wound springs; pencil lines running over paper and canvas as if knots in an infinite length of string. The complex is simplified in these works, and the simple given the full weight of all meaning. The pieces singly or together are hard to turn ones gaze away from for fear they might change form again when ones back is turned.