Exhibition Testimony #3: Sleight of the Canopy

“My god!” I chirped to the bright young woman working at the gallery, “This is really nice paper.”

“Is it?” she replied uncertainly, wondering why she was being accosted about the quality of the paper the exhibition text was printed on.

“Top shelf stuff right here. Who’s your paper dealer?” I joked, receiving only awkward laughs.

The delectable thickness and gloss of the paper felt like polished ivory between my fingers. The wonder of such crisp and smooth paper in my hands was the equivalent of buying branded groceries after a lifetime of cheap, off-brand stuff. I felt bad about the creases I made by folding the sheet up. Too many things bring me to such feverish excitement; paper is one of them.

I apologised for interrupting her conversation to rave about paper and slinked off to look at the art. For that was the reason I was here.

On the 5th of March at 5:57pm I marched up to Incubator Arts, a gallery space in Marylebone. Although quite small, its clean sophistication matched the neighbourhood. Nina Ogden’s solo show Sleight of the Canopy was having its private view tonight. I befriended Nina after writing about her submission to The Hari Art Prize last year. Having seen only one of her pieces in person, this was a promising opportunity to get better acquainted with her work.

Seems I was early, there was barely anyone there. Little did I know that I should’ve savoured this empty space while I could… My friend Belle, who was supposed to meet me, was running late so I decided to go inside. With a glass of prosecco or champagne (I never ordered any to find out) in one hand, Nina was regaling one of her guests. Sporting a white button-up shirt tastefully paired with a black skirt and tights, she effused girlboss energy. With a hearty greeting, she pointed me towards the bar downstairs. Wonderful. It was less a bar and more a window in a wall, but that’ll do! Feels somewhat disrespectful being in a private view without a drink in one’s hand. So, once I paid my respects to the social order by not paying for this drink, I headed back upstairs.

Walking up that steep and thin flight of stairs with a nearly-full cup of beer felt like the Earth’s gravity had suddenly concentrated on my spine, pulling me back and down. Thankfully I didn’t tumble into a humiliating heap, but I resolved to treat those stairs like quicksand for the rest of the night.

Lush foliage from distant worlds sway out of Nina’s paintings. At a quick glance they appear as a fervent ode to Nature, but the longer and harder you stare into its depths, a morbid, almost-hallucinatory quality is found. This impression is intensified by her blistering colour palate and sublime application of paint.

To me, her compositions aren’t just windows through space but time too. They contain a world where/when Nature is left to thrive in the absence of civilisation. All manner of plant life has reclaimed its hold over an abandoned domain. Buried beneath, however, are the vaguest remains of human presence; symbolised most directly by the eyes that recur throughout her work. More indirectly, I imagine large and empty necropolises littered with technology that fuelled humanity’s hubris, all of it shrouded by flora.

This relationship between the natural and artificial – one of the many dualities in her practice – is epitomised by her time working as a scenic painter on film and TV sets. “The workings of a set,” Nina illuminates for me, “are captivating to watch. There are countless beautiful compositions and scenarios that remain unseen. The choreography of lights and rigging being moved in and out of place is quite a display. Crew members milling around or huddled in the darkness around a screen, viewing their creation come to life. Makeup artists, chippies, and scenic painters darting in and around camera setups to dress the piece for the camera — it’s all a performance.”

Impeccable timing makes the set move like a single organism; life and animation emerging from the coordinated assembly of elementary particles. In much the same way, Nina’s paintings are more than the sum of their brushstrokes.

Three drinks later. A not-inconsiderable amount of people were in the gallery now, with more walking through the front door. I was transfixed by a pair of works titled Visitant 1 and 2, small rectangles out of a vast field of crops. I couldn’t avert my eyes from the fleshy appearance of these leaves that contradicted their usual texture. Whatever lifeforms were flowering here blurred the lines between the phallic and vaginal. The incandescent hues these are painted with give the impression of some nuclear fire burning across the land, radiation scrambling the plants’ DNA.

While imagining the mushroom cloud beyond the frame, the soft voice of a man beside me asked, “What do you think of this?”

I indulged this handsome man in my visions. His clothes were cut from the night while his fair skin and blond, curtained hair glowed like the moon against the firmament of his outfit. Alfie is his name.

“Have you felt how nice that paper is?” he said while pointing to the diminishing stack of exhibition texts. This was all the convincing I needed that I could indeed trust this person.

We gravitated towards the largest painting in the show behind us. More than two metres across and almost as high, it ate up most of the wall. Actually most of the works in the show were committed to huge surfaces, towering high above the spectators. Yet another aspect of her practice influenced by her past as a scenic painter.

“The scale of scenic painting,” Nina tells me, “is highly performative. This process can be messy and physically demanding, but there’s an energy that emanates from the paint when it’s worked with physically. I’m currently scaling up many of my pieces to return to this mode of working.”

The canon of art is replete with works that dwarf their creators, requiring the artist to literally walk, crane, or climb across them to reach a certain detail. This energy which Nina speaks of comes from more than just the artist’s hands coming into contact with the work. Painting on an easel is clean, clinical even. A waltz between ideation and creation choreographed through a hand and brush. Larger works that demand the artist’s traversal, on the other hand, are closer to a seizure than any form of dance. The artist unwittingly contaminates the work with their footsteps, prints, shedding hair, bodily fluids, and other imperceptible and inescapable bacteria. What results is a work that radiates every bit of the artist’s exertion.

Anyway, back to this gigantic painting Alfie and I found ourselves before. Titled The Harvest Maiden, it drops you within a boundless cornfield – perhaps the same field from which the vignette-like Visitants come. One could speculate that Nina’s going through something of an agricultural phase, considering that these three are her most recent works in the show. The colour gradient shifts from a lively yellow at the top to a sinister red near the bottom. It’s down there where the crops – like in the Visitants - resemble reproductive organs more than plant life. Clear definition of shape and form near the top of the piece melts into discombobulated panic at the bottom. The only thing that has any clarity down there are a pair of frowning eyes, staring out of the hellish depths… There’s a sense of festivities abruptly interrupted by an apocalypse. With this disembodied and accusing stare fixed on us, we become complicit in the imminent disaster.

“I’m loving the colours on this!” exclaimed Alfie with a painter’s admiration.

“Can you tell me about your choice of colours?” I asked Nina later on.

“I was drawn to the beauty of warm colours and their common association with light. However, the meanings of the palette underwent several changes throughout the painting process. For instance, The Harvest Maiden initially depicted a celebration of light and the summer harvest, but it swiftly shifted to fire and destruction as the Los Angeles fires were being reported on the radio.” It’s moments such as this that demonstrate the porous boundary between life and art. Nina continues, “Viewing a painting can be a profoundly visceral and physical experience. I believe that a painting can even physiologically emit heat in a way and I’m keen to push the multi-sensory aspects of painting.”

With all these burning notions in my head and alcohol in my veins, I went out for a cigarette. I pinched one off a familiar face I spoke to earlier.

“What’s with the scaffolding across the street?” I asked her while pointing to a building shrouded in the stuff.

“Oh there was a fire two something weeks ago!”

“Shit! Were you around to see it?”

“No, I was off that day,” she said disappointedly after taking a drag of her cigarette. “Typical isn’t it, nothing interesting ever happens when I’m working.”

“Kinda like when the weather is great only when you’re stuck at work.”

“Exactly!” she said, flicked her cigarette away then went back inside after bidding me goodbye.

Curiosity roused, I looked up news of the fire on my phone.

CHILTERN FIREHOUSE FUTURE UNCLEAR AFTER FIRE

The irony of a Victorian fire station catching on fire after it got converted into 5-star restaurant wasn’t lost on me. Apparently it was burning wood from a pizza oven that brought the place to its knees, cementing the fundamental beef between ovens and fire stations.

By this point, an hour before the end of the show, the place was heaving. It was impossible to walk in a straight line. Too common is the occurrence, especially in smaller private views, when people arrive later on in the evening to find the drinks cabinet cleaned out. Which was partly why everyone was making a beeline for the bar and staying downstairs, encouraged by others who were staying because this was where it was happening. So many backpacks and jackets, I was surprised nothing was spilling or crashing into the artwork. With needy glasses, Alfie and I went downstairs for a drink and to have a proper look at the art there.

The one we came face to face with, Emerald Haze it was called, departed from the prevailing colour palate of the show yet it emitted no less physiological heat. Palm fronds, delicately rendered in an exquisite blue, hung low over a pool of water, skimming its glassy murk.

“This one’s on linen while the rest are on wood,” Alfie pointed out. Intriguingly, a background wasn’t painted in. The coarseness of the linen peeked through the minuscule gaps between the leaves. Something seemed delightfully broken about this piece, as if the system wasn’t powerful enough to render the graphics in the distance.

“The mediums and the material on which the picture is painted are equally important,” Nina told me later when asked about the materiality of her mediums.  “They become an integral part of the work and convey a lot about the artist’s intention. The image and initial idea dictate the ground on which to paint. Some of my paintings are on linen, some on wood, and one is on a modern aluminium-structured panel.”

I’ve had a personal encounter with one of her aluminium-backed panels while working as an art handler during the installation of The Hari Art Prize in 2024. Nina’s submission was Lycan, this operatic scene of plants bathed in a harsh light both heavenly and artificial. Those plants could be at the pearly gates just as much as they could be in a tiny greenhouse. The painting’s beautiful mastery is matched only by how prodigiously heavy it is. Most artworks are relatively light because the only weight they have to them is the wooden frame stretching the canvas or linen. (And the layers of paint if you want to consider that decimal weight) You can handle these singlehandedly, provided you’re careful and don’t knock a hole into it with the edge of a table. With an aluminium frame, suddenly you need two people taking an hour to install it in a very awkward-to-reach spot.

“If I want a softer picture with washes,” Nina continues, “it’s easier to achieve on linen. Wood was used as a tool to change my painting technique and push me out of my comfort zone. I worked as a photo-real painting assistant, so I adopted this style of painting in my own work. It was meticulous and slow, and it didn’t quite convey what I wanted to say. At the RCA, I wanted to move away from this type of painting to something more painterly and expressive. So, I experimented on wood instead of canvas. Its absorbency and texture forced me to adapt my painting method. I had to loosen up and make it work. It also felt familiar to paint on such a surface because it mirrored the wooden flats I had previously been painting on in film. Wood panels have a more architectural existence.” Proven by the fact we’ve built houses out of them for centuries!

Here emerges yet another duality in Nina’s practice; the illusory and often simulated nature of reality. Everybody has a different name for this feeling when the world briefly defies its own logic. When the cosmic order of reality seems to malfunction. When the universe’s mask slips and things once familiar appear uncanny and weird. When something takes the form of another.

“Last week,” she recounts, “while queuing to take my children to their karate lesson, I noticed this hedge changing colour as the wind changed. It was like the sequin fabric that changes colour as you stroke it, causing the sequins to flip over. I took countless videos and images of it, much to the amusement of the other parents!”

Blurring this line between the artificial and real is an integral part of scenic and photo-realistic painting. Hence Nina’s delicate command of lighting in her compositions.

Our eyes were caught by this pinkish-orange canvas with a bizarre arrangement of plants. Sprouting with fine detail from the bottom left corner of the frame, the flora loses shape the further towards the top it reaches. The fundamental forces holding their form together dissipates, leaving the brushstrokes and lines to loosely roam about like unbound electrons. There’s the slightest suggestion of a bird within this soup of marks.   

Belle texts me she’s outside… about a half hour from the show finishing. She arrived fashionably late in her goth uniform. Because people from Kent recognise each other by way of some sixth sense, she clocked the Kentish in Alfie. Nothing to do with me telling her…

“You need a drink!” I told Belle and pointed her downstairs.

Ten minutes later she returned from the pit, bleary-eyed and out of breath with a cup of frothy beer in her hand. “What happened?” I inquired.

“I’m never going down there again!” she vowed with the emphasis of one overwhelmed.

Right this way, I told her, come look at some art to calm your nerves.

“There’s so much floral stuff here,” Belle remarked one she was in control of her faculties again, “Why?”

Nina answered this question later on by indulging me in her childhood growing up in Snowdonia, North Wales. “I was immersed in nature. We had this incredible garden surrounded by fields and lots of sheep!  I spent a lot of my time strolling alone in the fields, gazing up at the forest that stood above the hill and letting my imagination run wild with thoughts of eerie goings on.” But of course! Nature conceals as much as it reveals. Who knows what goes on deep within the lightless fathoms of the ocean, the consuming depths of forests, the vast fortress of clouds, and the infinity of space? Nina sprinkles glimpses of the rich inner life her flora, leaving enough out for us to fill in the blanks. Never giving us the full picture makes her compositions all the more compelling.

Speaking of an incomplete picture, we were standing before an unfinished work. Each of us traced the lush coastline of this painting as it spread out against an open sea of unpainted linen along the edges of the frame. Against a palate of hot yellows, greens, and browns, the dull earthiness of the linen feels right at home in this scene. It unfolds before the eyes like a hazy memory. Running through the foliage are these tight loops, faint when in the background while shimmering as they catch the light in the fore. They look like barbed wire to me, the symbolic barrier that’s preventing us from recalling this memory properly.

“I had a clear plan for how the painting would look,” Nina says. “However, the painting had its own ideas and took me in a different direction. One of the hardest aspects of painting is knowing when to stop embellishing a piece. I try to stop when the piece conveys what I want it to. Adding more detail after that tends to undo the original intentions.”

The age-old struggle of knowing when to stop rings loud and clear through Nina’s words. An artwork isn’t some inanimate entity waiting to be molested by the artist’s will. It’s the projection and progeny of the artist. A life of its own that desires communication. An artist must listen to their creation in this process of gestation, for sometimes an artwork is born prematurely even when the artist deems it incomplete.

Every now and again, my spine tingled with the strangest sensation of being watched. It wasn’t the people nor was it the glassy stare of the photographer’s lens. All I’d find when I turned around was a pair of painted eyes gazing deep from within Nina’s vignettes. There were also these smaller works dotted around the place that featured nothing but eyes. The Runner’s eyes seem somewhat confused, shocked even, painted as they are on a birch wood panel without any accompaniment. Forestrian, a still straight out of a nightmare, depicts a single eye drowning under a thick flood of malignant green paint.

“What’s with the eyes?” Belle asked, transfixed by their disembodied stare.

“They came about from my experience working on Big Brother,” answers Nina. “You know the show, ‘Big Brother is watching’ and the classic eye motif. It was a voyeuristic experience. I was in a dark ‘camera run’ that surrounded the set, and I looked through a two-way mirror into a brightly lit artificial environment. There were times when I got bored, and I would pull back the curtains of the two-way mirrors and watch these manipulated beings do things like eyebrow plucking, leg shaving, and even mental breakdowns. Sometimes, they would knock on the glass, desperate to break the boundary. The eyes signify looking and the idea of surveillance. The idea of watching is a reaction to the human psyche, modern technology and society.”

Every aspect of our lives is so meticulously tracked and scrutinised that surveillance is almost tacitly accepted. None of us want our data and information harvested from us, yet we write it off as a natural inconvenience and move on with our lives. The eyes in Nina’s paintings not only remind us of the ever-present scrutiny, but they also remind us of our reasonable suspicions towards surveillance which we’ve turned way down low to accommodate living in a soft-surveillance state.

“We often discuss nature as something separate from ourselves,” Nina told me, “but we are an integral part of it. The notion that humans are distinct from nature or even superior to it is the driving force behind its destruction. It is crucial to recognise that the language we use to describe nature and its definition has a profound impact on society and our relationship with the natural world.”

In this context, Nina’s work is at once a celebration and a rethinking of nature. By laying bare all its wonderful weirdness through its beauty, she imbues her plant life with immortal personality. Recognisable emotions such as fear, transcendence, dread, bliss, and love radiate off species that supposedly feel nothing. Nina’s paintings are a glorious snapshot of this. 

As we were leaving, dreaming about fantastical private views that serve free whisky and canapes, we stood stock still before Powder Illumine, the first and last painting one sees in this place. It positively glowed with its rich goldenness with a thicket of reddish-green leaves crowding up from the bottom left corner. Staring at this thing brought up a religious feeling that’d make an atheist cry. Witnessing such a charming depiction of nature made me feel proud to be a part of it. Knowing that the same atoms that constitute not only me and those plants but also the paint and materials used to depict them were once spewed out by distant and exploding suns is a very humbling sensation. As I walked through the nighttime streets of Marylebone towards a bus stop, the leafy boughs of trees rustled sweetly in the wind. And that’s what keeps bringing me back to Nina Ogden’s work, the consciousness of a life over which humanity have paved their entire existence.