SweetBitter is a solo exhibition of paintings by Glasgow-based artist Nat Walpole. As an accomplished print maker, comic book and graphic novel artist, over the last 10 years, she has developed a style of storytelling within a frame, cell or canvas, as well as between images and through images in sequence.
SweetBitter’s mythopoetic panorama
In SweetBitter, through a series of paintings created in the last two years, the audience is enveloped in a mythopoetic panorama. Working in washes of acrylic paint, Walpole builds up deeply-coloured spaces which deftly move between the micro and the macro, inner worlds and portraiture. There is much to enjoy in the dramatic shifts between situation and symbol, between line and texture, specific vistas and impossible spaces. Entities and bodies sometimes bleed into each other or are separated through dense detail, plastic rendition and shadow. Then again, within the same canvas, the same body might trail off into a flat outline or hieroglyphic. A body might emerge from texture or as a negative space in a richly resolved landscape. This shimmering unrest is a way to render all these contradictions, and to hold them together.
A painter’s eye
The trans bodies in Walpole’s work are carefully observed with the objectivity of a painter’s eye, but likewise from the personal perspective of a trans artist. Walpole also makes these bodies incubate within the traditions of classical painting and the imaginary of Ancient Greek mythology (through motifs such as ‘Leda and the Swan’). This mythology is also encountered as a rubbish-heap, a hall of mirrors which reflects unconscious imaginaries surrounding trans bodies and experiences.
Shocking crotch painting
In ‘The Cessation of the World’ – a response to Courbet’s ‘Origin of the World’ (the famous and shocking crotch painting), Leda and multiple swans meet in a swirl. The birds are menacing, but also felled – they jump out of the canvas as deceptively realistic, since they are vessels for Zeus who has taken their form only to sexually violate Leda. Leda’s trans body is green, glowing – it could be rendered in metal or stone, or glimpsed in a vulnerable moment of rest. Anguish, sexual exploitation and commodification, meet cosmic erotic forces. The scene is loaded and unbearable, but perhaps it’s just a daydream. In another canvas Leda herself becomes the swan: reptile, human, bird, divine. Her escape is presented almost as a diagram – the immediacy of lived experience is far in the distance.
In ‘Walking Home at Night’, the two female figures are joyfully striding, their shapes harmoniously woven into a nocturnal landscape. The light they shine on themselves is only one of the glows held by the darkness. The snakelike form ahead might be a swell of their power, building to a mountain top or volcanic eruption – or is it a hostile force still looking for a shape and a name?
SweetBitter creates a space which envelops you in immediate sensations, while also rewarding deeper engagement. The great strength of this exhibition is that it presents its subject matter through a confident weaving of traditional and modern painterly motifs and techniques.
SweetBitter is at CCA, Glasgow till 23rd November 2024
Featured Image Credit: ‘Walking Home At Night, acrylic on canvas, 2024’
