The Gallery, Caithness Horizons, Thurso, 23 June-29 July 2012

THIS exhibition of collages, prints, watercolours and calligraphy by Mary Hamada Parker represents a unique artistic fusion of Japanese expressive tradition and European abstract and representative painting inspired, in part, by the Caithness landscape, writes George Gunn.

THE Caithness Horizons Gallery is a naturally well lit space and this sense of northern light highlights well the atmospheric yet controlled palate of ochre browny yellows, blacks, reds and off whites which colour this striking exhibition. There is a discipline to this artists work, and yet the series of watercolours of flowers spills out of the gallery and into the corridor and some of the paintings even escape from their opaque placings in energised green droplets as if the passion of the creation could not be contained by the limitation of a frame.

Mary Hamada Parker - Walking The Anointing

This energy is also apparent in the series of 18 collages of print and paint where landscapes – Japanese or Caithnessian – seem to reach out of the frame and the figures contained in them are either emerging into or out of a dream or revelation. These vary from the two flagstone-grey Caithness inspired pieces to the decidedly Japanese, calligraphic Tree of Life with its three (atomic?) mushroom-like layers. There are even shades of Klimt in the golden figure which dominates the foreground of Walking the Anointing. This is contrasted with the subjective violence of Tsunami, which for all its Japanese tragedy has a decidedly Caithness, Morven-like shape to it.

Mary Hamada Parker - Tsunami

This combination of violence, tragedy and minimalism finds its expressionistic fulcrum in the series of five watercolour prints entitled Christ’s Hands: each work consists of a series of black hand prints, open in supplication but with various waterfalls of blood red paint pouring from them that reminds this reviewer of Ralph Steadman at his iconoclastic best.

But the still centre of this exhibition is the ten abstract calligraphic works where the need for abstraction or representation is subsumed in a process in which, as Mary Hamada Parker describes it, “only the creative instinct is working”. The appropriately titled Perfection shows this “instinct” in action with its swatches of black ink on innocent paper.

Mary Hamada Parker - Perfection

This exhibition is a challenging journey into the world of a highly idiosyncratic artists yet one who takes the two aspects of her creativity – from both sides of the world – and fuses them into vibrantly charged work which will stay for a long time in the mind of those fortunate enough to see it.

© George Gunn, 2012

Links

• Caithness Horizons