Kate Giles: Solid Air

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]We are so thrilled that you wanted to come and have a show in the Aldeburgh Festival. And what does the Aldeburgh Festival mean to you? But Britain's music um like it was for my parents who moved here 25 years ago. They retired to Aldeburgh specifically so they could carry on going to Snape and being part of the the sort of musical scene there.

[00:00:20]I mean uh particularly Snape. I mean there's there's no uh there's no place like it.

[00:00:26]Um with the reeds almost like they're almost I always being like staves or notes on a stave. You feel if you look at the you look out from the back over the marshes you could hear it. And um in in the exhibition there's a whole series of of small um in a way portholes that that there's a whole the range from quite big and emotionally engaged paintings where where the the paint sort of has it sort of insists on its own direction and and form and structure is undercut.

[00:01:00]Um and interjected I think by these very small ones. They're to do with with responding to having a conversation with Ruisdael's you know 17th century views and then contemporary ones which are takes on the railway journey from Amsterdam Sloterdijk to Haarlem.

[00:01:19]Um and then they come full circle to sort of areas of of of where I've been living and where I've been working. And and so in a sense the these final paintings um do seem to come straight back to the view for in Aldeburgh itself. This whole thing is about windows really and sight. And there's that wonderful quote in the Larkin some comprehending glass.

[00:01:43]And I think that's I I did a series of paintings that we sort of looking through train windows.

[00:01:49]It's quite difficult to do reflections of the other side of the train of the carriage in the window. But you know you have a have a go. They're the same things. He's vanishing these beetling vanishing distance points. I mean, what I'm really interested in is is how you can on a flat surface, on a two-dimensional surface, how you can comprehend or bring into appearance space and volume. I mean, I think that's why it's one of the main reasons why sort of paint.