Patricia Paolozzi Cain | A Gateway to the Internal Mind

Patricia Paolozzi Cain's 'His Wings' Shadow'

We are delighted to present new work by multi-award-winning artist Patricia Paolozzi Cain. Based in rural Dumfries and Galloway, Patricia Paolozzi Cain's often large-scale works of art form an active and shaping force between the artist and her physical environment. Tangled tree branches, dense hedgerows, a fusion of fallen leaves, sedges and thickets are the preamble to Paolozzi Cain's abstracted compositions. Getting lost in nature's cosmos is for Paolozzi Cain a means to look inward, to introspect. In her own words, she says, "I focus on nature as a gateway to the internal mind." Using a process of intense scrutiny, where she transposes and edits what she sees before her, Paolozzi Cain turns observations into a rich, meditative language that is as much rooted in place as it is in consciousness. 

The pastoral landscape of Dumfries and Galloway is a major influence in Paolozzi Cain's practice, visible in works such as 'Milnton Diptych', which is named after her home- a Victorian sandstone house surrounded by walled gardens, shrubberies and acres of lush, rolling farmland. The eponymous work is on the face of it a tribute to its natural beauty- evoking the earthy smell of wood and grass together with birdsong and the rustling of wildlife. While the lattice of branches and thorny stalks that feel their way under and over and across the pages express something far more subliminal. They are a rhizome of thoughts and feelings that root and reach for deeper meaning.

Patricia Paolozzi Cain's 'Nullarbor Landscape II'

Works such as 'Nullarbor Landscape II' (above) and 'His Wing's Shadow' (at the top) are drawn from places further afield- one from a road trip through Southern and Eastern Australia, and the other from a residency in Provence, France. The former captures the arid landscape of the Nullarbor Plain from the moving car window. Indistinguishable, the flecks of colour document the richness of the Australian desert in motion. 'His Wing's Shadow' assimilates the deep ochres of the Provençal soil and through whimsical mark-making, imbues summer breezes, dappled light and birds fluttering aloft. Both of these works are unique in their own right but what they share is Paolozzi Cain's perception of the "whole". Sensory elements in the form of shapes and patterns found in nature are woven into a unitary force, braiding the external with the internal, where the 'whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts'.