“Through painting, personal narratives and visual histories can be constantly dug up, questioned, agonised over, copied, and regurgitated. Painting is a medium always in rehearsal, always practising its lines.”

In order to explore a freedom of content and material in his work, Phil Frankland sidesteps the familiar lineage of painting-making. His ongoing experimentation with both handmade and digital methods of mark-making results in a deep intimacy between what can be perceived as purposeful interference and the by-produce of a long process of editing, layer and blending.

Frankland has recently been using an inkjet printer and scanner as tools to blend printed imagery, handmade marks and spills into images that relate to both the static nature of some technologies and the looseness of artist-controlled interferences. He uses the scanner to produce digital gestures over heavy, dirty gestures made with paint, ink, clay, pigment and varnishes.

For Test Space, Frankland presents the most recent results of this ongoing digital process into the physical space of the gallery. Differentiating between studio and gallery, he will present expanded copies of these print/painting hybrids alongside older and newer paintings as an expansion of a studio setting.

As a reflection of his process he wants to pull apart the scale of the works in the space, forcing relationships between works with louder physical gestures and quieter, more materially tactile interventions.