Romany Eveleigh: "Pages"

The works on paper from the “Pages” series by Romany Eveleigh approach painting and drawing as forms of written expression. Approximating the visual landscape of the ‘page’, the works make use of techniques and materials borrowed from the world of writing, printing and mechanical reproduction.

Neither purely painting, nor drawing, the works on canvas hover between these forms. Paint and ink on paper provide the ground for the “text”: hundreds of circle-like marks etched into the amalgamated ground. But these are not typographic signs and this ‘writing’ does not produce an intelligible message. Rather, the abstraction of typographical figures and their formation into columns or blocks merely conjures the idea of writing and the blank spaces that surround them suggest margins of a page. The directionality of the painted marks is significant here. Undoubtedly the process of inscription begins at the upper most part of the frame and moves to the bottom: the white margins at the top point to the origin of the work and also propose that we read these paintings as forms of speech, written expressions.