Devonshire Collective’s fourth project at Port presents a solo exhibition of new and recent paintings by Brighton-based artist Lydia Stonehouse.

The exhibition’s title draws from a line in the poem ‘A Great Wagon’ by the 13^th Century mystic Rumi. He writes: 

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there’s a field […] When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.”

Within her work, Stonehouse envisages moments of connection, points in which there’s a softening of boundaries between the body and external world. Her paintings are often structured around diagram-like drawings that act as skeletal maps. Sometimes translated directly onto the canvas through carbon print, they become partially embedded in the painting process. These drawings visualise and trace points of connection between bodies and places, tracking the transfer of things such as light, heat, touch and thought.

In her work, figures sometimes become part of a landscape, or tethered to it through lines. In other works, figures appear fragmented or cut off from things.

Stonehouse uses marks that suggest movement of forms, and she connects them across the canvas to one another, making some paintings ‘busy’ with a build-up of marks and clusters of intensity. These are combined with flushes of colour that fade across the canvas like radiating or fading energy from a source.

When Rumi speaks of the world being “too full to talk about” at the point our internal world meets the outside world, for Stonehouse, those moments bring about a heightened bodily awareness, and a sense that the world is more full and ripe than we can be aware of or articulate.

Each artwork is available to purchase via Devonshire Collective. Please enquire to edward@devonshirecollective.co.uk. All purchases support the artist and Devonshire Collective’s artistic and public programmes.

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