The Shape of Time brings together two artists who at first seem to have little in common. Lawrence Noga works with paint, collage and assemblage, often mixing all three. He uses found elements that look like old tickets or labels taken from various sources, sometimes combined with fragments of unidentifiable objects, their now forgotten origins repurposed into art.
Sharon Hall’s work is uncompromisingly abstract although still related to the observed world. She admits a fascination with the almost imperceptible movement of the shadows on her studio walls, slowly shifting as the hours pass by. Responding to this, her abstraction is not static or balanced. Areas of colour push against one another and are filled with an energy and internal tension. They carry an implication of potential movement and consequently, the passing of time.
The elements that Noga incorporates into his constructions were all found in abandoned boxes stored in his late father’s garage. Inevitably, this also hints at the passing of time although in a very different way to Hall’s work. Double Red Filtered Blue (the 400 Club) is a reference to a jazz club in Torquay where the artist’s parents first met. This, combined with the various bits and pieces from his father’s old boxes, hints at how places and events from different times still resonate within us today.
In Sharon Hall’s work, similar distant echoes come from the frescoed walls of Italian churches. Recently she has been treating the surfaces of her works with an absorbent chalk-based ground, to make the colour more a part of the picture rather than sitting like a skin on top. She compares this to a Renaissance fresco where the colours, having been applied while the plaster was still wet, were absorbed into the surface of the wall as they dried. Italian titles for her paintings such as Notte, Finestra or Senza Titola (Roma) hint that there might even have been a specific source. There is nothing that could be seen as a direct quotation but these paintings nonetheless carry an oblique connection to her Italian predecessors. Similarly, a distant connection to something that might exist in the real world is evoked by the painting titled Japanese Fan.
Noga confesses an admiration for artists like Eduardo Paolozzi or Peter Blake, early pioneers of the British Pop movement and indeed, there is something undoubtedly ‘Pop’ about his work. The painted elements, made of brightly coloured and jagged geometrical shapes, flow together in syncopated rhythms, bringing a vibrant musical quality. Features such as solid black circles with a small central hole evoke the discs of old vinyl records while areas with short repeated stripes become reminiscent of musical keyboards.
The reusing of forgotten fragments found in old boxes or the abstract geometry of shifting shadows gently moving across a wall might seem to have little in common but both artists, consciously or otherwise, can be thought of as responding to one of the central mysteries of our existence, The Shape of Time.
Colin Wiggin
