Between the lines

Hutch, Dunedin

22 August - 24 September 2025

Polly Gilroy’s works in between the lines translate observations from her surroundings. The intimate tie between colour and light inspired Polly to take note of moments in her daily life such as light refraction, light falloff, bounced light and subsurface scattering. These moments of reflection were reinvisioned when harnessing light play in her own compositional manipulations. The series Light vestiges shows sensitivity to the complexities of colour that are forever shifting in changing light.

Gilroy’s title between the lines implies there is an intention to these works that isn’t directly communicated, grasping at what may be hidden. Gilroy is recognising the unspoken intentions of colour and how these interactions within the frame encourage the viewer to slow down and question their own perception of these shifting hues. A mirrored moment of contemplation.

Gilroy often negotiates the confines of structure and brings the support frame into the formal composition, encouraging viewers to look through and beyond. Exploring the nature of perception, she uses light as an active player. While materiality is key to her works, the result embraces illusion and within this there is a paradox. These works have an ethereal quality yet speak honestly to their substance and construction. Her hand is invisible. Deceptively minimal compositions push and pull spatial depth. Focus seems beyond grasp. 

“Gilroy’s work ostensibly focuses on the play of light, colour, and form, yet subverts the normal relationship between these three parameters and the painted surface.

Rather than beginning with a canvas or similar ground, the artist has used her surfaces — light silk — as a muting agent, placing them over a painted base. Instead of seeing images coalescing from forms on the surface of the work, Gilroy’s work forces us to focus on the structure of the timber and boards which make up the stretchers and frames of the work.

What appear at first to be gentle washes of paint or ink on the surface of the silk are the work’s infrastructure. The silk itself retains its original pale solid colour, whether white, yellow, or blue. The patterns we perceive "on the surface" are the wood upon which the silk is stretched, the shadowy forms we perceive being the shapes of this substrate. Our focus moves from the usual surface work to examine the shapes of the artworks and the girders of their construction.

Within this metaphorical and literal framework, we are left with attractive pastel colourfield abstractions, exemplified by the soft geometries of the various Light Vestiges pieces.”

-James Dignan, Otago Daily Times, ART SEEN