Deborah Gourlay

Artist in Residence 2010-2011

'I have always been interested in architecture as a source of inspiration, and I am particularly drawn to derelict ‘forgotten spaces’. These atmospheric and decaying buildings hold an aesthetic and emotional appeal for me.'

'In the last couple of years, English Heritage has kindly granted me access to the Grange, a neo-classical mansion near Alresford, whose interior lies derelict and which has been left as witness to a forgotten time. Its crumbling interior is in a state of transition, revealing signs of its history, and its silence is charged with the residue of human presence, drawing on one’s memories and emotional reaction to these spaces. I work in an intuitive way, using a variety of mediums but drawing and printmaking have always been central to my practice and recently I have combined these with glass and photography.

My drawings explore the drama and atmosphere of these emotionally charged interiors whilst the photography allows me to suggest a more ephemeral and transitory aspect of how we experience spaces through memory, allowing us to see time in all its elusiveness. Memory appears to distort the truth allowing nostalgia and melancholia to creep in. I see these silent interiors as a poetic space in which to daydream. They exist neither in the past nor in the present – in a sense it is time that now inhabits them.'

Deborah Gourlay
August 2010