Accompanying Text written by Sinéad Gleeson
When she was a child, Diana Copperwhite’s father, a science teacher, showed her how a prism worked. This breaking down of white into pure colour - the refracted light revealing each individual shade of the rainbow - stayed with the artist. Looking at her work, this offers a major hint at her painterly motivations. Copperwhite’s work is frequently preoccupied with light, and interested in what’s beyond the visible spectrum. In a new show The Only Thing is the Everything, the artist cites an interest in the building blocks of Fibonacci sequence, recognising that “while there’s structure and order in the universe, there is also chaos”.
Scientific elements hover around several of the pieces, not just thematically but in their construction, particularly with the spectral bands of colour so synonymous with Copperwhite’s oeuvre. In the new pieces, they resemble both technological glitches and something ghostly or otherworldly. In ‘Pulsar’, hairpins of colour warp back on themselves, alluding to the rotations of Constructivism, but also the malleable nature of time, and the loops and binaries therein. One of Copperwhite’s great skills is the ability to capture moments that resist being frozen in time. Her canvasses are possessed of a kind of kineticism; they revel in their own velocity. Light, growth and movement are connected and intrinsic.
There is a contradiction at play too. Technology offers endless visual possibilities that veer towards the psychedelic, evident in several works here. Our consumption of imagery is constantly filtered through the lens of screens, impacting on the definition and hue of what we see. In the title work, ‘The Only Thing is the Everything’, the brush strokes are haptic; a sensory antidote to digital auras.
Copperwhite consistently seeks connections between things. Other artistic forms, like film and music, filter in. Few painters can fill a canvas with so much – objects, moods - and the scale in several of these pieces is certainly filmic. This preference for larger work allows all of these elements to co-exist, and figures – like characters or protagonists - haunt the canvases. In ‘Ophelia, tactical errors in reimagining', a woman is submerged and surrounded by colour and movement. Despite the static pose, her face curtained with lines, there is sense of questioning within it.
Holistically, in each work, the viewer has much to absorb, including microcosmic scenes happening in small pockets and on the margins. Music hugely influences Copperwhite, and her process is symphonic, adding individual layers on top of each other to create cohesion. She photographs everything, and the work gets more abstract with each accumulated layer. Some of these pieces are based on people and places, with ‘Anatomy of Gardens’ inspired by a visit to Jardin Majorelle in Morocco, which was restored by Yves Saint Laurent. Amid woozy perspectives and angles, one focus is the toothpaste striped steps, an invitation into the canvas itself. A smaller series, ‘Anatomy of Flowers’, hones in on this botanic theme and in No. 3, pink, purple and black are stacked like paint swatches.
There is recurring sense of something just out of reach in all of these works. But even amid the hazy pulsations, the paintings that make up The Only Thing is the Everything are grounded by tactility. Like much of the artist’s previous work, the anchor is always colour.
Sinéad Gleeson
February 2024
