Octopus Moon by Arryn Snowball

Octopus Moon | Arryn Snowball

9 - 27 July 2024

Standing in a foreign desert under a vast night sky, the stars seem foreign too. When the moon rises, it is up- side down. Why does consciousness insist on the con- sistency of being? Astronomers tell us the earth and the moon and the sun are all spinning through space at in- credible speeds. Yet the evening is still and crisp. I look outwards from this little fixed point somewhere just be- hind my eyes, as if the self is the only stationary point in the universe. Of course it is not the moon that is upside down, it is me. I sometimes wonder whether painting is a window or a mirror: is it a practice of witnessing the world, or merely expressing my own incomprehension?

My practice focuses on movement and light, pattern and rhythm, change and transformation. As an abstract paint- er, I love the basics: triangles and circles, the tension of a curve. I try to keep things simple, but complexity natural- ly builds up. This exhibition contains paintings of words and spiderwebs, moon and stars, mountains and high- ways, galaxies and octopus, a wild fox and a Takhi foal.

I’ve been on the road a lot over the last few years, help- ing my partner Monica with her fieldwork, interview- ing scientists working to save endangered species and visiting reintroduction projects in remote places in Romania, Mongolia, New Zealand and Canada. I feel very privileged to participate in these journeys, I’m finding a larger appreciation for the scale of the world.

The little watercolours were mostly made during these travels. Small attempts to capture the at- mosphere of a landscape, the colour of an an- imal, or a transition of light. Watercolour is easy to travel with and I like to work with co- lour in the morning, almost like a meditation.

The paintings on canvas were made in my studio in Berlin. I tried to keep the process as simple as possible to allow the themes to emerge from one painting to the next, as if on their own accord. I reduced my palette to a matte handmade black on a cream-white gesso ground. When I’m painting in this way, there is no undoing a mark. Sometimes it feels like a cascade of irreversible mistakes, but this pulls you into the moment. While I start by add- ing black to the white, at some point a threshold is crossed, and painting no longer feels like addi- tion, but rather like a subtraction of the remaining white; at this point the image becomes nocturnal.

- Arryn Snowball 2024