Fleur Patrick
And Still
21 March to 18 April
Opening: Saturday 21 March 3 - 8pm
Artist talk at 4pm
“Unlike all other art forms, film is able to seize and render the passage of time, to stop it, almost to possess it in infinity. I’d say that film is the sculpting of time” Andrei Tarkovsky
SCHOOL is pleased to present And Still, an exhibition of new temporal paintings by Fleur Patrick. Drawing from cinematic imagery, Patrick isolates telephones—a recurring motif in film—to capture the tension and anticipation of fleeting, suspended moments. The telephone, in her work, signifies events that are passing or about to happen, reflecting both anxiety and intimacy.
Patrick’s technical skill is unparalleled, yet she paints with a calm softness that imbues her compositions with warmth. For this series, she uses film stills as source material, layering translucent glazes and partially wiping them away to create surfaces that echo cinema’s cycles of appearance and disappearance, projection and return. Removed from narrative momentum, the telephone hovers between recognition and uncertainty, fiction and memory, past and present. By freezing what film usually allows to flow, her paintings highlight the circular nature of viewing: images resurface, repeat, and quietly embed themselves within us, becoming memories both borrowed and intimately personal.
On the exhibition title, Fleur explains:
“I like that it references film stills and the frozen moment of painting. It suggests continuity despite change and the passage of time. It’s also a song title that David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti worked on for Lost Highway (1997) but didn’t actually use. I like the suggestion that David Lynch goes on…”
Born in New Zealand and now based in Nottinghamshire, Fleur Patrick emigrated to the UK as a child. This experience, alongside her perspective as a neurodivergent woman, has left her with a keen sense of geographical and social estrangement. She graduated with a First-Class Fine Art degree before completing a Painting MA at the Royal College of Art (2003). Her accolades include the Zurich Contemporary Painting Prize, Amlin Painting Award, and Desmond Preston Drawing Award, and she has been shortlisted for both the Jacksons Painting Prize and the Contemporary British Painting Prize.
Patrick’s work has been shown at venues including Pumphouse Gallery, the Korean Ambassador’s Residency, London Art Fair, Art Frankfurt, and The Commonwealth Institute, and it features in numerous private collections internationally.