This autumn, CAMPLE LINE is delighted to present The green fuse drives the flower, an exhibition of new work by Brighton-based artist Aimée Parrott.

Installed across both floors of our building, the exhibition will bring together a new body of work that offers an irresistible amalgam of painting, printmaking and textile-based techniques, through which Parrott continues to explore transitional and dual states of being and processes of transformation, transference and exchange. Monotype printing combines with dye, appliqué, staining, and stitching, producing surfaces that bear the physical imprints of time, gesture and touch.

In a recent conversation with Jennifer Higgie, Parrott described her approach to making as ‘an ebb and flow, a kind of listening, paying attention. And letting things happen, and then trying to hone them into something.’ Typically, she works on unprimed canvas and calico and occasionally bamboo silk and has spoken previously of the painting surface as a porous, skin-like boundary – ‘a stand-in for the body, a fragile, permeable site.’ In her work, biological, ecological, cosmological and geological frames of reference collide and jostle – her process is alert to the sheer liveness of things (‘the ground humming, incessantly humming, fizzing, crackling’), the thinness of boundaries and to the registers of time embedded in matter.

For Parrott, these are primarily intuited or embodied through her own experiences: an evening walk through the Neolithic causewayed site at Whitehawk Camp near to her home; the later stages of her pregnancy with twins; sheltering from midday summer heat. These find their way into her work as forms, repetitions, washes and tones that hover and hold within a constant balancing of part and whole, surface and substance, self and world.

Parrott completed the paintings for this exhibition in the context of the rolling heatwaves experienced this summer, particularly in the south of England where she lives. She has said: ‘In a sense, I feel there is something of a baked, bleached disorientation in the paintings, a sort of melancholy with palette and form suggesting being past a tipping point.’ Indeed, in these paintings there is a tangible sense of heat rising and swelling, of thin sound carrying across dry air. The impression is of slower, incremental movement, parts entangled; low-emitting orbs, voids and spaces amidst fibres, extrusions, strands and sprays of particle chains rendered as strings of thick dots.

In response to the autumnal timing of the exhibition and the impact of shortening days on the natural light in CAMPLE LINE’s spaces, Parrott will also include a series of painted hanging lamp works to illuminate our downstairs spaces.

A newly commissioned short essay by writer Jennifer Higgie will accompany the exhibition.

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