New artists and new work: Claire Kidd and Lisa Scrimgeour

New (old) artists and new work:

Returning artist Lisa Scrimgeour homes in on the most expressive features of human vulnerability. Eyes, noses, mouths – they’re all vessels that instinctively convey our innermost thoughts and feelings. The canvas becomes a showcase of human emotion, Scrimgeour balancing realism and a juxtaposition of colours that nod to the sweetened and sanitised false fronts we’re often forced to put up. Pastels and pinks merge gleefully with both ruddy browns and luxuriant honey golds. Textures and solvents smudge down faces like old clown paint, with the subjects’ jaded faces lying somewhere in between. The resulting images create something bold and unsettling, reminding one of a long day at the circus – including the sugar-highs, sickness and excitement that come along with it.

Scrimgeour has many works held in public collections across Dundee, Scotland, and has been spotlighted in the Guardian and Elle Decoration as an ‘Artist to Invest In’. Based in Perth, Scrimgeour has a distinctive style: part delightful, part devilish, and always intriguing.

Claire Kidd’s work teems with the strangeness… of interacting with strangers. How do we act communally? Is there a way to exit the inner world of the self, and share something greater? Through her uncanny work, Kidd often depicts crowded scenes that give an insight into human behaviour. ‘Some Sticky Swarm’ (2020), for example depicts individual figures that coalesce into a block, each seeking sustenance from a picnic spread. Focused on their own bowls, their bodies nevertheless merge in an upturned composition that suggests the scene might overspill into the viewer’s reality. Elsewhere, looping wire is playfully links outdoor figures, and separate them all at once. With a surreal exactitude, Kidd pins down the complexities of human entanglement.

NewBloodArt

Table Manners by Claire Kidd