Hypolix - Cate Smith, Justine King & Sarah Oskarsson

The latest exhibition at Whitespace, entitled Hypolix, offers the work of three students from Edinburgh College of Art: Justine King, Sara Oskarsson and Cate Smith. The artists have utilised the gallery space effectively in order to create a ‘conversation’ between the works, as an attempt to analyse the immersive nature of painting.

Oskarsson’s large-scale works convey a direct interaction with painting. She employs ‘non-traditional’ materials and processes, attempting to provoke a consideration of the parameters of the medium itself. The use of metals and substances often sourced from Chemistry laboratories parallels Oskarsson’s work with the constant evolution of natural sciences. This lends her paintings an affinity with the romanticised discipline of alchemy, creating a mellifluous yet severe presence.

Alongside Oskarsson’s mammoth productions, Cate Smith’s paintings manifest as a more transient investigation. Smith’s multi-layered paintings examine the relationships between spaces, people, memories, experiences and the contexts they inhabit. She classes her works as ‘ambiguous landscapes that exist in the past, present and perhaps in the future.’

Justine King’s work is drawing based and devoid of painting, yet she is interested in the fundamental relationship between the two practices. Her time consuming drawings consist of expansive spaces of meticulous mark making. She aims to ‘illustrate everything within a vast space of nothingness.’ Each of her titles, such as 932,016, refers to points of interception, fluctuations in line and individual marks. Through these rule constructions, King addresses assumptions about order and disorder, the finite and the infinite.

Compositely, these artists have produced an exhibition which is engaging and subtle. Although, due to the time-consuming nature of their labour, the exhibition demands a similar attention from the viewer. Each artist employs their individual methods and processes in order to assess the boundaries around the disciplines of ‘drawing’ and ‘painting’, while further alluding to the natural world. Hypolix manages to be simultaneously ethereal and grounded; profound yet basic.