Amelia Alcock-White’s recent paintings contain something of this paradox.
They are decorative surfaces and mystical portals. Figurative and familiar
on one hand—conjuring the dock at the family cottage, the benign and lazily
paddled river, the shimmering afternoon at the seaside—these paintings
are also dramatic and highly stylized fantasies. Where the artist’s settings
are not so easily relatable, we are transported into an ambiguous marine
reverie where subjects are submerged in a pristine, glittering underwater
universe or held rapturously in the embrace of vibrant decorative patterns.
Alcock-White’s work uses water almost exclusively as a metaphorical
backdrop for human experience. It is a thematic device through which
the artist articulates her personal and spiritual journey and explores
her relationships with place, family, and the environment. Water is the
universal bond, connecting us with ourselves, each other and the natural
world in the artist’s images of hope for transformation and renewal.
