In her third solo exhibition at LON Gallery, Dord Burrough presents a series of expansive new works that continue her interest in the happenings of the mind, our relationship to the environments we inhabit, and how these encounters can be translated through the painterly. Burrough’s new works push the boundaries of abstract painting and sculpture to assert mark making as a physical manifestation of unconscious processes.

Burrough’s practice is increasingly focused on allowing the body to dictate its needs, welcoming fleeting instances of irreconcilable paradox as the body translates the mind’s momentary escape from cognisance. Working on larger surfaces throughout this body of work, Burrough has moved away from defining conceptual frameworks to allow energetic formalism to emerge. The physical manifestation of this immediacy can be seen in the open pictorial planes of Burrough’s recent paintings. Exploring a more muted colour palette than works exhibited at LON Gallery in 2019, Burrough’s expansive canvases have led the artist to explore the physical rhythms of the act of painting. In dark vortexes of black, swathes of washed white and surges of oranges and blues, Burrough pushes the pictorial plane into comprehensible chaos to produce canvases evenly occupied by fields of line, colliding to create organic textures and incidental moments of perspective. Equally, Burrough’s recent sculptural paintings demonstrate a reactionary approach to working with non-traditional materials. Often incorporating sand, plaster, gap filler, air dry clay, oil paint and glue, the chemical properties and temperamentally of each material dictates Burrough’s response. Protruding from the picture plane into three-dimensionality, Burrough synthesises conventions of painting and sculpture to create works rich in texture and tactility. The intuitive process to layer and stack materials encapsulates Burrough’s ambition to make seen the physical act of making – every flash of colour or coil of clay feels at once contingent and deliberate.

Abandoning the graphic and illustrative motifs of her previous work, these paintings mark a turn towards the most unfiltered manifestation of Burrough’s enduring interest in processing the world around her. Ultimately, Burrough’s blending of paint into semi-translucency and loading up of unconventional materials enable gestural and abstract marks to, for a moment, be registered as figurative – our own minds assigning certainty to the incidental.