Pamela Honeyfield: Stream of Consciousness

Stanley Street Gallery presents Stream of Consciousness by Pamela Honeyfield. A series of gestural paintings, exploring the artist’s sensitive perception of landscape, capturing the raw energy of places travelled and experienced. 

Pamela Honeyfield’s exhibition, ‘Stream of Consciousness’ takes us on a journey through her emotive sensory experience of landscape. Her embodied mark-making lead us toward a vibrancy and musicality of atmosphere and light, to the edge of their depth and possibility. The work will often take on a life of its own and each colour and brush stroke made, will dictate the next.

“Most of my landscape works are not of a ‘real’ place, but they are about me and my journey, often presented as a landscape metaphor”. 

Spontaneity and rhythm are central in this narrative. In her art-making process, listening to music informs an affinity for the improvisational. It engages the mind and makes us move, her favourite being the rock n roll of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, often singing and dancing while painting, never staying still. For Honeyfield, part of what inspires her is the ‘happenings’ that exist within this instinctual approach to painting. The music and the action of painting being integral to the process of collecting and transcribing her unique visual language.

Working mostly with oils on large scale canvas or linen, Honeyfield purposefully engages her whole body into each work. In this dance and embodied relationship with the canvas, she allows the colour and the placement of marks and shapes to play and interact. It’s the participation of colour as they sit next to or on top of each other, the way one will cancel out the other, that prompts the development of each brush stroke. This is where one must make the decisions about what to keep and what to knock back. Human observation and memory ground the gestural marks, recalling the experience of environment and imbuing it with expressionistic colour, and texture.