The Holden Gallery at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, is a light and lofty space with enough period features to easily distract from work on display. Yet Pippa El-Kadhi Brown’s paintings staunchly and delicately hold their own space, offering a welcome otherworldliness as you step inside from the rugged Manchester winter. A culmination of her twelve-month Freelands Studio Fellowship at Manchester School of Art, Stranger Skies debuts twenty-nine of El-Kadhi Brown’s new works, ranging from large scale canvases to intimate works on paper. Taking inspiration from sources as broad as animations and graphic styles, nature, the sixteenth-century illuminated manuscript The Book of Miracles, personal memories, carnivals and nineties ephemera, El-Kadhi Brown blurs the line between human and alien, internal and external, reality and imagination, allowing forms to slip and shift. Her mostly large canvases are filled with organic shapes, complex colours and layers of texture that refuse to sit still or point clearly to a single place of origin.
When we meet, El-Kadhi Brown talks eagerly about the freeness and experimentation that the Fellowship has allowed her. Her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, completed in 2022, she says, ‘was crucial for understanding and refining my practice’, but in the years since she felt her work had demanded something new. The time and symbiotic nature of making work in dialogue with students and tutors that the Fellowship has allowed her has rejuvenated her practice, loosening it up a little to become more reflexive, reassessing and adjusting the direction of her trajectory. Consequently, her work has become lighter and more fluid, moving away from the explicitly figurative paintings and domestic landscapes she was making previously to more fantastical images of psychological space, of memory and sensation where the paint takes charge and she thinks less, plans less, forces less. ‘Aquaria’ (2024) is a strong example. In it we are plunged into a sea of marks and colours that invites us to submerge ourselves and let them wash over us rather than look from a distance.
This loosening approach was grounded in El-Kadhi Brown’s process rather than research, and grew through discovery. Her canvases start supine and her paint thin, surrendering an element of control to her medium. These early marks dictate the forms that emerge before she turns the canvas vertically. From these early, wet layers, El-Kadhi Brown chops into the emerging contours with drier paint, the colours becoming bolder as her confidence in the work’s developing path grows. The work doesn’t settle though – its orientation continues to shift as El-Kadhi Brown works on each canvas from every angle, only deciding upon its final direction when nearing completion. This no doubt contributes to the flowing, erupting, contracting and writhing that brings the paintings to life, leaving behind the stasis of fixed subjectivity. In the later stages she often adds charcoal details, dancing across corners and balancing compositions, whilst works like ‘Phoenix Feathers’ (2024) see iridescent chalks add texture, conjuring images of alien lifeforms or sea creatures that continue this feeling of movement and fluidity. In ‘Tall Grass Whistles’ (2024) and ‘Nightshade’ (2024) it is the hazy outlines of the shapes that give them the feeling of motion, evoking the feeling of being unable to fully remember or focus. These are foggy recollections whose colours imply happiness but whose uncertainty brings a layer of scepticism and suspicion.
The figure is still present, even sometimes in its absence. In ‘Flux’ (2024) a shroud drapes over seemingly nothing, and paint appears smeared by fingers in ‘Acatenango’ (2024). The eye searches for familiarity and human likeness – a foot appears, dismembered by biomorphic forms in ‘Monkberry Moon Delight’ (2024) and in ‘Magnets to Dreams’ (2024) a hand likeness reaches out from pastel suggestions of flora. Aesthetically, these paintings in particular remind me of contemporary American painter Christina Quarles’ (b. 1985) works, whose clashing colours and forms wrestle across her canvases to dismantle assumptions around identity and bodies. There is also room to read these paintings as references to twentieth-Century Surrealism with its rich history of women artists like Dorothea Tanning (1910 – 2012), Eileen Agar (1899 -1991) and Leonora Carrington (1917 – 2011) experimenting with fragmentation, mysticism and the uncanny.
By platforming these ‘almost’ forms, El-Kadhi Brown encourages the viewer to look longer and ponder harder – does ‘Flesh of the Forest’ (2024) really depict plants with teeth or speckled tentacles, cherries or drooping flowers, hands and feet or dense tropical forest? El-Kadhi Brown describes this, in a beautifully awkward manner, as ‘room to dangle a “maybe”’. She further encourages such visual association by purposefully not labelling the works in the space. Though titles and an essay are available in handout form, the absence of a dictatorial voice regifts for the audience the freedom she benefited from during her residency – an invitation, if we’re confident enough, to open our minds, follow streams of thought, be hypothetical, be abstract. Here, again, we are denied the comfort of a fixed and sedentary ‘answer’.
The colour palette across the majority of these new works is cohesive – a pastel garishness, aged but bright, evocative of early nineties clothing prints or the stiff, waxy tablecloths that protected tables from birthday cake and blackcurrant squash. The sun-bleached appearance of the colours and the twisting, floating nature of the forms combine to arouse feelings of nostalgia, of hazy memories too fleeting to fully capture – more of a feeling than an image, reminding me of Charlotte Wells’ semi-autobiographical directorial debut film, Aftersun (2022).
The recent zeitgeist for nostalgia – a sentimental yearning for times gone by – touches all genres of creativity. There are seemingly ceaseless remakes of films, sequels and prequels to originals like Ghostbusters (1984) and Jurassic Park (1993), a revisiting of simpler sounds and lyrics in albums such as Taylor Swift’s folklore (2020), reboots and repeats of noughties television shows like Friends (1995 – 2004) and even the total resuscitation of former heavyweight Barbie (2023). ‘Nostalgia’ has moved away from its original meaning in the late seventeenth-century when Swiss physician Johannes Hofer (1669 – 1752) used it to refer to what he believed was a medical syndrome experienced by homesick Swiss mercenaries, and now denotes what cultural theorist Svetlana Boym described as a ‘mourning for the impossibility of mythical return and the loss of an enchanted world…’ (2001).
The rise in this desire to hark back to earlier times correlates directly to perceived escalations in issues such as climate change, global disasters, political unrest, financial instability, violence and more. The insecurity of the present and uncertainty of the future pushes people to find comfort in the past, where we cherry pick the aspects of our chosen nostalgic era, remembering the good and blanking out the bad. This is expressed beautifully in Well’s film, where naive childhood memories show viewers glimpses of a father’s darker side. It is this partial remembering of scenes and revisiting sensations that El-Kadhi Brown’s work evokes, the lack of clarity pushing you to question which details you can rely on. The luminosity around some of El-Kadhi Brown’s forms have this compressed and collaged reality, a dreamlike gamescape that is familiar enough to draw you in but ethereal enough to hold you there, guessing, like the visual equivalent of reaching for a word but it remaining just on the tip of your tongue.
El-Kadhi Brown’s probing of the linearity of time spreads into her approach to space too. ‘The Fly’ (2024) shows repeated motifs fanning out from a central point. These, she says, are snapshots of the same object as if viewed by a fly weaving around a room, experiencing a static composition from myriad perspectives. This attempt to more accurately visualise how we really absorb our surroundings, all at once rather than as single images, is similar to the decades-long investigation of David Hockney (b.1937) into our perception of the world around us. In doing this, El-Kadhi Brown once again attempts to depict the human experience of being – of moving, living, remembering – from an internal standpoint, within the body, rather than sitting on the outside, at a distance and creating an image of a person.
Beside some of the large mystical scenes sit smaller canvases that seem to function as snippets of memories, depicting a thingness, a feeling, a chunk of thought before it dissolves. You can draw connections between some of these and their larger counterparts – the recurring shape in ‘The Fly’ also appears in ‘Sweet Musca’ (2024) and gives the impression that you’re stepping into El-Kadhi Brown’s imagination, her own world where these organic forms live. The exhibition also gives insight into a rawer stage of El-Kadhi Brown’s process in the form of even smaller, rougher, quicker oil pastel, charcoal and chalk works on paper. Framed to give their petite dimensions more substance, these works, like the eponymous ‘Stranger Skies’ (2024), come across as more instinctive or impulsive, slightly furious even. El-Kadhi Brown describes them ‘more like warmups, not studies’, highlighting that thinking less and freeing oneself actually takes great effort and practice – is a skill to be learnt and one that I think her work has benefitted from hugely.
The paintings that retain more definite figuration enjoy the same fundamental components as the more abstruse works, yet their easily recognisable features simplify our understanding of the scenes before us. In ‘Power Shower’ (2024), for example, the eye locates a bath, a chair, a shower curtain, and a leg, which places the viewer within a bathroom, undertaking a daily ritual. Though these components are far from realistic, appearing through a sort of psychedelic lens, their very identifiability goes some way to limiting our capacity for personal interpretation. It is not destroyed, just kept on a tighter leash than in El-Kadhi Brown’s other works here that conjure a mystical fog for us to find our way through and out of, stumbling across personal recollections along the way.
There is a sense of the uncanny in El-Kadhi Brown’s paintings, slowly suggesting that all might not be as happy as their inviting colours first suggest. The seduction of nostalgia is strong, however, so I’ll risk it to swim in these hypnotic paintings a little longer.
Pippa El-Kadhi Brown: Stranger Skies, Holden Gallery, Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, 31 January – 27 February 2025.
Laura Biddle is an Assistant Curator of Exhibitions and Displays at Tate and a freelance writer based in Manchester.
This review is supported by Manchester Metropolitan University and the Freelands Studio Fellowship with Freelands Foundation.
Published 14.02.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
1,759 words
