Detail of Portrait Without A Face, 2022 by Caroline Gormley
Oil on canvas, 92 x 138 cm

Caroline Gormley

A Kitchen Sink Drama (solo show)

MADE IN PAISLEY, 69B HIGH ST, PAISLEY, PA1 2AY

MEDIA PREVIEW: THURSDAY 23 MAY, 11AM — 1PM (BY ARRANGEMENT)

FRIENDS AND FAMILY PREVIEW: SATURDAY 25 MAY, 6PM — 8PM

EXHIB

ITION: SUNDAY 26 — FRIDAY 31 MAY, 10AM — 4PM (FREE)

Caroline Gormley’s paintings confront the daily realities of being an artist, a business owner, a partner and a mother, navigating a labyrinth of responsibilities and aspirations. The washing up waits in the sink. Drinking glasses sit on the draining board, soap bubbles sliding off them. A makeup bag and the morning’s post spill onto the kitchen worktop. In A Kitchen Sink Drama - her first solo exhibition in a decade - Gormley invites viewers into a world where invisible familiarity becomes visible, and the private becomes public.

In her public life, Caroline Gormley was recently recognised in the 2024 Provost of Renfrewshire’s awards for her services to Arts and Culture, notably for her work as a co-founder of Made In Paisley on the heart of Paisley High Street: a thriving studio that has been offering painting tuition to students of all ages, for more than five years.

It is her inner journey that has led to the body of work presented in A Kitchen Sink Drama. It draws from the artist’s personal experiences as care giver, a mature student and of motherhood: influences that infuse the exhibition and affect how Gormley feels about her life in the here and now, as she celebrates her 55th birthday and opening her solo show to the public in the same week. For the artist, the personal milestone marks the right moment to share a body of work that honestly speaks of her day-to-day experiences and is the culmination of her painting practice across a decade.

The exhibition title is both a nod to the unvarnished grit of the artist’s subject matter and to the eponymous cinematic dramas which depicted 1950s domestic reality.

Caroline Gormley is an artist who believes in giving the same ‘graft’ and scrutiny to whatever she does, whether that be making a meal for loved ones or making an artwork. Blending large scale canvases and microscopic closeups, Gormley’s depiction of the everyday is forensic. In her painting, the small and personal moments and memories are enlarged to a scale that almost shrinks the viewer. But it is not clinical: she tenderly renders the grooves in floorboards and the patina of her life: revealing the artist’s persistent balancing act between the demands of her everyday life and also the labours involved in making her artworks. These are images built up carefully with care, intention and, if not love, then certainly passion, irrespective of scale or detail.

At the start of lockdown, Gormley took the most precious everyday commodity ‘bog roll’ and used each square as a little precious window. On public view for the first time, A Kitchen Sink Drama will include a selection from the 200 miniature pandemic-inspired oil paintings, created by the artist whilst she was shielding during lockdown - tiny topical artworks capturing universally recognisable intimate moments and world shifting events alike, in tight, detailed brushstrokes.

Whether working on small or large scale, Caroline Gormley is direct and the objects and stories in her paintings are larger than life.

THE END

“Caroline Gormley manages to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, almost like film stills from David Lynch movies, incorporating the surrealistic, ironic, twisted humour of Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet”

Alexander Guy

Artist details and images

Contact : Julie Telfer 07900 245 563 julietelfer.art@gmail.com www.julietelfer.com

Co-written Julie Telfer & Jean Cameron

Caroline Gormley
Portrait Without A Face, 2022
Oil on canvas, 92 x 138 cm