Hayley Tompkins: surroundings @ The Modern Institute, Glasgow

This autumn, much acclaimed Glasgow-based artist Hayley Tompkins brings new works to The Modern Institute. Acrylic paint on wood panels, sticks and clothing offcuts form an installation which is dreamlike yet wonderfully palpable. In a gorgeous release of pale nudes, sharp yellows, and loud blues, we are welcomed into worlds so familiar that they escape us.

The title of Tompkins’ exhibition, surroundings, is plural – not singular. It indicates multiplicity, yet offers no specific locations. Inside their paintings, abstract shapes suggest the presence of hills or furniture, while bodies appear and disappear. This unruly collection of works refuses to offer any specificity or permanency and that is its undeniable draw.

Working across large-scale panels and smaller, more contained canvases, Tompkins allows her medium its own fancies. Paint builds and builds upon itself, resting in small mounds. Elsewhere, brush strokes are frenzied and heavy. It drips, watered thin and fickle. In allowing the paint to shift from state to state, Tompkins reminds us too of the transformative potential of spaces themselves – both subject to change and capable of changing us.

A surrounding, much like a piece of clothing, may dress us; we may put it on and take it off. With a nod to punk aesthetics, in Tie, Cuff VII and Cuff VIII, painted shirt cuffs and a tie join the works. Both the absence of a body and the suggested severing of a body offers an eerie intimacy that is irresistible. Unknowing the origins of each fabric piece only exacerbates such mystery. Their positioning, too, is purposeful. One cuff is vertical; the other hangs horizontal; the tie is hung fairly low. Tompkins demands that to join these wayward surroundings, we must physically move ourselves, whether through lowering our body or turning our arm sideways. This subtlety of meaning is highly compelling.

surroundings, installation view, by Hayley Tompkins. Image courtesy of the artist, The Modern Institute and Toby Webster ltd. Photo: Patrick Jameson.

Our journey through the exhibition is partially guided by the painted sticks, tugging us onwards. Pinned against the wall, but never laid flat, they’re delightfully restless. So restless, even, that they abandon us half way through the exhibition; this playful lack of commitment echoes the whimsy of the paintings themselves. Tompkins invites us to lose ourselves in abstraction.

In the far right corner Transceivers hangs, hidden upon first entering the room. Weighed down by heavy black at its centre, the work takes on a cave-like quality, with slithers of neon pink and baby blue attempting to enter the light. In this deeply evocative piece, Tompkins allows us a moment of pause in the almost darkness.

Each work has a place, which appears to contradict Tompkins’ abstract, ungovernable style. With its careful curation, surroundings refuses to fully disorient us. In doing so, a brilliant multiplicity – promised by the beautifully ambiguous title – is sacrificed. Long stretches of white gallery wall stagnate and suspend the works. In a slightly smaller, mundane room, we’d lose ourselves not simply in the paintings but between them too. Such is remedied by the room’s own shapeshifting: from above, sunlight spills out of a skyline window and, to the left, Osborne Street goes about its day.

With Tompkins’ surroundings, the multiplicity of intimacy is celebrated and beautifully so. Connection is known and unknown, certain and uncertain. Great artistry meets a boundless exploration of personhood and its particularities. surroundings moves and we move with it.

---

surroundings, The Modern Institute, Osborne St, Glasgow, until 19 Oct