“Stone Dreams” by Amy Hilton
From April 1st to 9th 2016
Amy Hilton presents paintings inspired by different stones and minerals as part of the Museum of Mineralogy. In these paintings, fluid forms almost seem to move; constellations of points that the viewer is invited to unify according to his desires using suggestive lines are some of the works presented at the museum.
Amy Hilton was born in 1986 in Lincolnshire, England. In 2007 she graduated from Goldsmiths College of the University of London. In January 2008, far from the brouhahas of London, she settled in the Alps, in Chamonix, where she reconnected with nature. Her artistic aspirations grow with the changing seasons, on the peaks of the mountains. She currently lives and works in Paris.
The conjunction of the singular and the whole is the working concept that accompanies the artist throughout his academic or intimate writings, on the course of his creations, through his travels and projects.
With this aim in mind, she practices various subjects and mediums to question the philosophical notions of “consciousness” and “world” and to try to decompartmentalize beings and phenomena, which far from existing independently and distinctly according to her, find meaning in their relationship with nature. “Deep ecology” in the words of the artist who honors the power of physiological and mythical cycles.
An anecdote that Amy Hilton likes to tell to convey the inspiration that animates her: she discovered on a beach a stone fractured into two parts (in a place and time that will not be revealed to the listener although he feels it was a real coast of sand and sea). Two distinct parts, and yet everyone can imagine bringing together these two pieces of the same material that fit together perfectly. The sharpness of this stone’s breakage does not mean that it can be thought of as a coherent and unique form.
“Finally we return, stars of fatigue in the eyes, but hands and heart dazzled.” 1
The imaginary, nourished by all interior intensities, sometimes crosses in an occult coincidence the intrinsic aesthetics of millennia-old stones. “This is how men, in their technique and sensitivity, invented gestures of expression that Nature, without being aware of it, carried out mysteriously.”2 Amy Hilton is worked by these secret correspondences that have never made her doubt that our representations like our bodies remain the production of comet dust. All of these artistic series are “attempts to tame these secret analogies,” the artist suggests. The “Stone Dreams” extend this trail. At the umbilicus of large leaves appear stones which, like a darting sun, double their arrival by causing the papers that receive them to curl.
… On a puddle of water poured directly from the empty leaf, from this void that torments the human being in search of meaning, his brush does not trace or define at all; it maintains currents and ductile movements within the liquid mass. It is there and only there, under the influence of a humble inspiration, that she scatters the pigments on this aquatic microcosm which reminds us of the primordial ocean surrounding the ancient worlds from which scientists concede that all life comes. It removes inks, dust, crushed rocks, spices, perfumes and poisons that are lost in the turbulence of the small lake. She barely directs the Great Work, tilts the plane of the paper, reiterates one of her colored throws, caresses the turbulent surface of a brush, blows softly sometimes. The poem is arranged according to Mallarméen’s chance in front of the meditative wonder of the artist. A world emerges as the water evaporates (which can take several days) under an attentive gaze. Manifestation of a cosmos whose lines of sutures shine through to the rhythm of this dreamlike dilution. The sedimented ensemble is very much like the poetics of a polished opal, a moiré fragment of labradorite, or a dream stone: the work has chosen the artist who has only ensured the conditions of its genesis. Aesthetics that perfect the techniques of those dream hunters who were the surrealists, innovative aesthetics of creative abandonment, of the radical inversion of the creator and the created. A “dream catcher” that relaxes the gaze of the artist as much as that of the spectators.
Excerpt from the text by Gaëtan Bros
Simultaneously, there will be an exhibition of the works of Amy Hilton presented at Galerie Fatiha Selam (58 rue Chapon, 75003) and at Drawing Now (Carreau du Temple, 4 rue Eugène Spuller, 75003), on stand C18, with Galerie Martin Kudlek.
Formation :
Goldsmiths College, Université de Londres, 2004 – 2008
Expositions personnelles et collectives :
Première partie, solo, l’Ecloserie, Ile de Re, 2012
Come to my home, collectif, Théâtre Royale de Marrakech, 2013
Le tout et les parties, solo, Galerie Fatiha Selam, Paris, 2014
Dessin d’Amsterdam, Galerie Martin Kudlek, 2015
Synthèse de tout ce qui a précédé, The Averard Hotel, Londres, 2016
1: Michel Cachoux, Amonites ou les cornes d’Ammon, 1963.
2 : Michel Cachoux au sujet de son exposition « Pierres, Peintres et Poètes », 1985.