Everyday ephemera and personal experience are the tools of the trade for UK-based artist Kingsley Ifill, who calls the sea-facing southern county of Kent his home—a remote, isolated locale that has freed him up to create. Coinciding with a new exhibition of the reclusive artist's work at LN-CC, director Jack Whitefield presents Bouquet—a grainy, impressionistic take on everyday experience, drawing on the exhibition's themes of passing time.
Speaking about the making of the film, Whitefield says, "We ended up jumping in a van and going to see his granddad Tony—a boxer—and uncle Harry—a painter. Mashed together they were the personification of Kingsley's work, like a painting had grown legs with gold teeth and was now bob’in and weav’in across the room."
Unlike Ifill's earlier work, which drew heavily on recovered junk and found artefacts, the artist has now boiled down his approach—working with more traditional painting alone. As he explains about the current show: "In past solo exhibitions I've shown a variety of work together, side by side, sharing the space, verging on chaotic, sometimes conflicting. With Bouquet, the show is paintings, all from the same series. Narrowed down, concentrated." And these paintings, in their gestural markings, becomes a "mirror or sponge, absorbing the atmosphere or mood" of daily life around him, looking out over the English Channel, and the eye-opening skies that hang above it all.
Bouquet, the exhibition, is running at LN-CC until Friday 21 of December.