Described by Patrick T Murphy, the Director of the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, as ‘exuberant,’ writing how Taffina, ‘orchestrates form to achieve balance and sometimes imbalance, hers is a loose and free aesthetic, like Coltrane on a roll.’ Exactly! Looking at her painting is like hearing swelling, immersive, vibrant music... that you can dance to… Words fall short of the real thing - I hope you will come and visit us and see and experience for yourself this uplifting show, This + That.
The Diptych and larger canvases are oil paint medium. The works on paper are ink, gouache and small areas of acrylic, to offer slight contrast in surface from matte to slight sheen. The works are made by working directly onto the Arches paper and to Japanese paper in tandem, the Japanese paper is stacked allowing a bleed of media through the absorbent Japanese sheet to other sheet producing ever decreasing echoes of marks and shapes. The final stage in this process is to chine-collé the Japanese paper onto the Arches sheets using wheat-starch paste.’ The logic behind these works ,’ explains Taffina, ‘was a companion to the large paint works - as a lighter, more delicate note to the show, and to allow a process of chance to happen with echoes of the history of the making to be visible like ghost images’.
All the work apart from the large diptych is sold framed. The small works are in ink on paper in walnut glazed frames and the paintings on linen and canvas in simple tray frames.
- Isabel
Patrick T Murphy, Director of The Royal Hybernian Acadamy, writing on Taffina Flood.
"We live in an age of images and issues so how refreshing it is to encounter an art that elevates our spirit, delights our eye, indulges in the optical, and remains amoral, the latter a revolutionary stance against the status quo of fractured positions and sides.
Taffina Flood’s art is exuberant. It crackles with the electricity of chance. Colour, shape and line misbehave to create goofy-scapes that offer joy and possibility. There is humour here and a lot of deliberation - marks made, marks remade, lyricism allowed, lyricism disavowed. To view a canvas of Flood is to read a record of its creation from base coat out. She orchestrates form to achieve balance and sometimes imbalance, hers is a loose and free aesthetic, like Coltrane on a roll.
Scale is important to her and to abstraction in general. Scale offers substance to the artist and engrossment to the viewer ( I am avoiding ‘immersive’). It compels them to enter amongst the slapstick of the forms. To bump and grind along with them as they hustle for their reason within the composition. Punctuation, verb, noun, adjective each coloured shape elbowing the other for a defining role to be that punctum that triggers the teeming life of these painting.
Showing in London she finds herself amongst her British antecedents, Roger Hilton and Gillian Ayers who flicked the post war switch of redolent abstraction laced with humour. She shares their dynamism and irreverence. Flood’s art is imbued with generosity, it is open-ended, non prescriptive, its welcome embraces the viewer and their predilections and take them by the hand to an experience that will broaden and deepen their perception of the painting and its possibilities."
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Taffina Flood was born in Dublin and educated at The National College of Art and Design in Dublin. She received BA in Fine Art (Painting) in 1991 and an MA in Fine Art ( Painting and Printmaking) in 1998. She has a studio in Dublin and also lectures at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. Taffina Flood has exhibited both paintings and prints in solo and group exhibitions in Ireland, United Kingdom, France, Sweden and the USA.
The works are available to buy from the upstairs gallery at Connolly in 4 Clifford Street, London and online.