BA Fine Art - Painting, Central Saint Martins, 2007
Coral Churchill's paintings are thresholds. They enter into relationship with natural form, merging internal and external states into a single, shimmering field. Prismatic light binds the image like psyche binds memory: fragile, iridescent, precise. The horizon appears again and again - a symbolic line between the known and the unknowable, drawn and redrawn. The work holds a cellular longing for union - a merging instinct, shaped and contained. Each image echoes the moment just before language arrives, when sensation is whole, pattern is meaning, and colour is emotion in its first unbroken form.
Artist statement
My paintings take inspiration from natural forms reflecting cloud, land and seascapes to merge biomorphic structures and forms. The horizon is a connecting and repeating point, with prismatic light a central focus to create otherworldly spaces. The paintings focus colour into chromatic gradients, echoing the refracted light of sunrises and sets. In my work I am looking at the natural world through the prism of abstraction to create imagined landscapes, drawing from imagery of iridescent jewel-like insects to deep-sea creatures and their strange neon bioluminescent light.
