Artists

Tina Gillen

Press release

´LandFall´ brings together a new group of paintings that return to images and motifs that have appeared throughout Tina Gillen's work over many years: houses, the sea, boats, tents, trees, pools and fragments of landscape. They are familiar images, but they no longer occupy quite the same place. The title ´LandFall´ refers to the moment when land becomes visible after a journey at sea: a point of arrival, orientation or return. But the word also contains a more unstable reading: land that falls, ground that shifts, something once solid becoming uncertain. The paintings move between these two meanings. They draw from remembered places, personal photographs, images encountered in the present and fragments of the wider world. Rather than describing specific locations, these elements are simplified, displaced and recombined. A house can become a shelter or a memory; a horizon a promise or a limit; the sea a space of distance as much as connection. In ´LandFall´, landscape is less a place to be represented than a temporal and experiential space. Past and present overlap. Images that once carried ideas of departure, freedom or possibility return, altered by time and experience. The works hover between recognition and estrangement, between being somewhere and remembering somewhere. ´LandFall´ is not so much about reaching a destination as about searching for orientation, and about what happens to familiar images when the ground from which we look at them has changed.