"Heaven on Earth"

Solo show Shoreditch Gallery, Juggler Café Bar, Hoxton, London N1 6HG
Dates Aug 1st - 14th 2006

see pictures of show here >

This exhibition was part of the London Biennale, an international movement of artists and exhibitions in London and elsewhere from May through August in 2006

This exhibition celebrates a welcome return to painting, with an arms-wide swirling embrace of the medium, and its magical capacity for expressing the artist's own experiences of time and place. The world is ever changing, and our experience of it merely transient; we are here for a series of moments. Katie Sollohub paints this process, of being here, now. She records in her work the traces of her own existence. These large, bold paintings are full of objects, stories and histories, described in layers of colour and paint, thick and thin. They are simultaneously a daily recording of her own presence in the studio space, and a personal history of her own life; memories held in objects on window sills, stories told in the patterns of a window curtain.

The paintings never stay still as we look at them, reflecting the changing nature of her spaces. Not tied down as still life, the objects are free to move, or be moved. As they move, so too does she, painting from different viewpoints, looking both ways at once, looking up at the lights above her head, looking down at dirt gathering on the floor. The paintings seem to breathe. And as with the breath, there are moments of stillness, where the eye can pause for a moment.
In the painting "Heaven on Earth" we see the view from a Brighton basement window; looking out to blue sky and Spring coming in the budding trees, led up towards the heavens by steps and a small blue step ladder. Ordinary objects on the window sill take on a new life under her