Gail Corrie
Gail Corrie once told me why she doesn’t eat eggs–and no, it's not a vegan thing. “Eggs are for painting,” she explained, “I can’t look at them without thinking about paint.” Opening her refrigerator, one must take care not to encroach on the effluvial middle shelf. “Careful, that’s the rabbit skin glue.”
Classically trained in fresco-secco and ancient wall painting in Venice, the British, London-based artist has been mixing her own paint among other mélanges, which she affectionately dubs her potions, since the beginning. In fact, she’s more alchemist than artist. Her enduring inquiry into enzymatic reactions between materials, their oscillating conditions, and factors such as air, moisture, and time, define her study–wherein artworks are merely a byproduct.
Gail Corrie with her dog Nelson.
To learn more about Corrie’s work, follow her on Instagram.
With the use of natural materials and hand-mixed recipes, ancient techniques are employed to create unique contemporary panel paintings that are both reflective and absorbent in the presence of light. Multiple layers of different mediums are applied using a variety of archival techniques such as fresco painting, gilding, and painting on glass. Corrie’s work is heavily material-based, often employing time-sensitive processes that require diligent methodologies and consummate handling of potentially volatile, if not extremely delicate, substances.
Gail Corrie, Mistral, 2022, Mixed media and casein.
Corrie’s current mediums are pure pigments, gesso, plaster, casein, chalk, and oil paint. Central to her material analysis is a submersion into the minerality of things, and furthermore the exploration, replication, and manifestation of minerals. She investigates what saturates and what flattens; what looks amazingly stone-like to what resembles jewels; and what kind of iridescence is at play between the two poles.
Corrie’s studio at the Essential School of Painting.
Corrie’s home studio.
Corrie draws inspiration from the juxtaposition between turbulence in nature and the eternally unsettled human mind. She therein explores the experience of life and all its faces, from the physical to the abstract, with constraints being dictated by the materials themselves as well as her meticulous handling, sorting, and cultivation of various objects and supplies. She catalogues and stores raw materials with extreme care, employing as much precision in the appropriate cleaning and drying of her brushes as one would a still-life painting.
Gail Corrie, Savage Garden, 2022. Oil on panel.
“I draw on my experience of different techniques to create. Often my work will be a combination of plaster, gilding, pigments, and glass. I also incorporate time-sensitive natural processes, like oxidation, and love the fact that this is forever changing. ”
Gail Corrie, Dawn Chorus, 2022. Oil, homemade casein, and silver leaf on panel.
Intricate, entwined bodies populate the panels. Referential, natural figures and scapes emerge, yet simultaneously feel estranged and sometimes artificial–as though the original form has travelled through the recesses of the artist’s imagination only to return in order to express some ruminative abstraction, or lucent shadow, of the original subject. Her study goes further to identify the relationships between matte and sheen, light and dark, and representations of the collective collapse of the mind.
Corrie making casein paint in her studio in London. Courtesy of the artist.
There is something mystical about the scenes, where the uncanny meets the eerie. One swears they recognise fish within branches and faces in tree knots, and for a minute forget the rigid iconography associated with appropriated form or likeness. For a moment, the viewer’s imagination is free, as they confusedly acquiesce headlong into a more fluid language of representation–a language all her own.
Gail Corrie, Route des Crêtes, 2022. Oil and metallic pigment on canvas.
Unlike other languages, this language need not be learned–but rather asks us to unlearn the old ones; the ones that tell you that darkness is heavy and boxes are square, and all the tropes that inhibit seeing the world for all its wonderment.
Gail Corrie, Untitled, 2022. Oil and copper leaf on panel.
Corrie is currently conducting a two-year advanced painting course at the Essential School of Painting, London.
Selected Exhibitions
2022
Stars Under My Armpits, Essential School of Painting, London
2019
Group Show, Rvnhaus, Denmark
2012
Solo Show, Aix-en-Provence
Camille Moreno
Features Co-Editor, MADE IN BED