Edge Array

Existential angst takes compelling form in Tom Gidley’s Edge Array. A woman is painted in profile, with a brightly coloured geometric jacket conveyed in vivid detail; yet her skin is grey, merging hazily into a monochrome background. Her face disintegrates in a miasma of brushstrokes, and the entire canvas is riven with drips that reveal a raw yellow ground beneath, as if dissolving an illusory veil of reality. Only the jacket persists in this blurry Richteresque gloom, as if standing for a constructed mosaic of self-image. The title Edge Array refers to a data type used in programming algorithms to associate information with the edge of a graph: Gidley’s painting seems to conceive of a person as informational flux, a field of shifting coordinates in continual formation. ‘I’m interested in the mental connections we make that make up the shape of who we think we are,’ he says, ‘and how we see ourselves in relation to others. Who am I, what part of me is the fundamental essence of “me” – or am I simply an idea. Those are the questions that keep coming back. The work may take different physical forms, but that’s partly the point. It takes very little to shift for our concepts of self to be completely fragmented.’