Sharon Hall: Grids

Grids

The basic organising principle in the paintings of Sharon Hall is the grid. This is very clearly defined as an all-over colour charged lattice which mechanically fills the available area. The effect of the grid is to reinforce, even to the point of over emphasis, the finite planar character of painting itself, measuring out the full extension of the surface without remainder, to mark exactly the limits of the constructed pictorial field... to use a grid is to commit to abstraction and artifice, and set certain conditions which influence the other elements which the painting may contain, in particular those that come into conflict with the disciplined division of the canvas.

In Hall\'s work the dissident component is a looping meandering which seems at first to have escaped the grid\'s influence entirely, to roam casually and unhindered across the surface. However though it emerges as an expressive agent, its progress improvised intuitively to follow the path of a rhizoid growth within a schematic system; it nevertheless registers a response to its context. Instead of being the grid\'s opposite it assumes something of a schematic character itself, becoming in places partly decorative, or ornamental, in the musical sense, as it is wrought into baroque arabesques and curlicues which intersperse the looser linear sweeps.

David Sweet
2001