Gill Rocca’s recent paintings feature liminal spaces and represent subtle shifts in the perception of a place in time, exploring the thresholds between the mundane and the extraordinary. There is a sense of timelessness in Rocca’s work, a sense of being above and beyond history. In her hands, deserted snow-bound country lanes, municipal parks bathed in the glow of street lamps, or ghostly silhouettes of trees against a fading blue twilight become deeply atmospheric meditations on the transience of human life. She draws upon memory and invention as well as observation in her landscape works to present an ambiguous and elusive sense of reality at a point where the familiar is rendered strangely unfamiliar.
Always uninhabited, these illusionary scenes; the anonymity of woodland, still lakes, deserted roads, short-cuts and descending paths, invite the viewer to relate these places with their own memories, so that narratives of places both real and imagined are woven together. Rocca has commented that since she moved to the crowded city, her work has become more about limitless spaces. The impulse to arrest the frenetic urban energy of the city, to slow time, or even to stop time altogether, has had a direct parallel in her image-making technique. Rocca often works from photographs in a process she describes as “re-animating frozen time”. Somehow she has succeeded in transforming aspects of the ontology of photography into a painterly technique that preserves the mystery of the photographic process. The work varies in size from the intimacy of miniature pieces which form the Cabinet Painting series, to the monumental scale of the large landscapes. The Cabinet Paintings allude to the tradition of intimate and secretive collections of small works made popular in 15th C Europe; bodies of work are always conceived as a series and often involve the repetition of a particular motif or theme. Rocca is directly influenced in her subject matter by her travelling experiences, which have included a trip to the Arctic Circle and extensive travel through Europe, America and Australia. Stylistically she is influenced by film and photography as much as traditional landscape painting.
Gill Rocca has exhibited widely in both solo and group shows all over Britain and the Continent. Most of her works go into private collections in the UK, Europe and the US; recent paintings have sold to collectors in Switzerland, Germany and Italy. She has a handful of loyal collectors, and for the last three or four years her London solo shows with around 20 pieces in each have been a sell-out and waiting lists for new work have formed. Well known actors, directors and leading figures in the art world are among collectors of her work and corporate clients include The Royal Bank of Canada, McGraw Hill and British Airways.