**Gabriella Boyd,** *Floorplan*, 2022. Oil on linen. 130 × 190 cm. 51.2 × 35.4 in. Photo Credit: Theo Christelis.

Friends Indeed Gallery presents Signal, the US debut solo exhibition by British painter Gabriella Boyd, on view March 31 until May 13, 2022. The exhibition showcases a completely new suite of canvases, painted concurrently, that display sickish-yellows, blood-reds, and molded-greens enhancing each other’s brightness while also competing against each other for foreground. A balancing act of life and death, growth and decay.

An incredible mind and voracious reader, Boyd’s solo exhibition follows a robust schedule for the artist with works in Josh Lilley’s Here We Are in Croyden; Andrew Kreps’ Fifteen Painters; Timothy Taylor’s Reconfigured, and the seminal show Mixing it up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery.

Flaunt talked to Boyd about her paintings - the theme, the colors, and the inspirations.

**Gabriella Boyd,** *Retina (vii)/ loveroom*, 2022. Oil on linen. 160 × 120 cm. 63 × 47.2 in. Photo Credit: Theo Christelis.

You're having your first US debut show at Friends Indeed. What can we expect from the show?

I'll be showing new paintings that I've been working on over the last year, some a little longer. I tend to work on multiple canvases simultaneously, so it's a body of paintings which have gradually grown together over time.

So as you mentioned, you made all of the paintings simultaneously. Is there a theme surrounding the paintings or connecting them in any way?

I think of the paintings making up the show almost like a collection of short stories or songs making up an album—each painting is an autonomous but together they create a wider system. While I’m making, I try to let the paintings lead me, rather than keeping any theme in the forefront of my mind but, broadly, the works deal with ideas of care, desire and support structures. I think a lot about relationships—familial, romantic, fleeting connections. I think about how to sort of give tangible form to bodily sensations and peripheral senses or energy—things that would otherwise be invisible.

I can definitely see that—I see a lot of anatomy and bodily functions. Looking through all of your work and your website as well, I feel like you use the same color palette. Is there a significance behind the colors?

I’m drawn to the visceral impact color has. It can set the tone for a painting and lead the atmosphere or potential narrative - sometimes the choice is very intuitive and other times I'll choose a color which triggers a specific association more intentionally. In this group of works, a color which became key was this yellow-on-the-turn-of-green, like a bilious yellow, it feels as though it's somehow from inside of a body. The flat green sky in The Train for example appears saccharine and synthetic and raw and bodily at the same time. This painting was really led by that flat lozenge of color and its odd vibration between a toxic and organic tone. The red dots flowing between the figures also shape-shift - they are both cells and flowers, disease and decoration, growth and death.

I'm interested in how we hold images of the interior of our body in our minds eye, and the kind of formal simplification that happens when we think about things that we know are there, but can't necessarily see. We give color and shape to something which is inside us in the dark whether a red blood womb, yellow urine or green bile.

So yeah there can be a warmth and celebration in the use of bright saturated color but it can also be unapologetic and almost violent to force a focus on a scene or image which isn’t clear or serene but rather more fragile.

**Gabriella Boyd,** *The Train*, 2022. Oil on canvas. 140 × 210 cm. 55.1 × 82.7 in. Photo Credit: Theo Christelis.

I was going to say, I feel like the colors are bright and happy. But, I guess there's some darkness to it, there's a message behind. So what is the message or emotion that you're trying to send through your art or evoke from the viewer?

Yeah I don't have a preconceived message. I mean it’s a form of communication, presenting an emotional landscape for someone to digest, but I wouldn't expect any sort of control or understanding over how that is received—of course works are digested differently by each person.

What is your connection or knowledge of psychology? How did you end up wanting to create from that place?

I'm drawn to making work about my own experience of the world, relationships, having a body, the effects of architecture on your psyche. Where did it come from? I moved house a lot growing up and I think that made me aware from a young age that different spaces can change the way you feel, how shapes of rooms can effect on your head on quite an abstract level. That could be one of many kernels. I think about the space between our physical experience of the world and our mental understanding of it. The meeting of those can be quite clumsy, or complicated, or at odds with each other. In that messy territory I seek out tenderness, humor, discomfort through paint.

**Gabriella Boyd,** *Backseat,* 2022. Oil on linen. 40 × 50 cm. 15.7 × 19.7 in. Photo Credit: Theo Christelis.

Where do you look for inspiration when beginning working on a new piece or a new set of paintings?

I try to let it come from anywhere. Often people. I think the trick is to remain a receptor. Being on transport and observing people next to each other in close proximity often makes me want to paint. It could be a part of a painting that I've made that sparks a new work or a mashed resurfaced memory. Music. I use drawings and photographs and I read.

The intense intimacy that reading can evoke, inhabiting a characters mind that . It's not linear, sometimes it takes me a long time to work out how to use something even though I know it excites me. So I let the juice build up in the studio until I have agency over it or something. I might make a painting that's a continuation of a work that I made three years before. So the works are constantly referencing each other and creating time loops between each other.

How do you know when it's time for a new photograph to become a painting? Is it just a feeling?

It really depends on the context—sometimes a painting dictates what it needs next and I'll realize I have a photograph to help me problem-solve, and sometimes I'll be drawn to photograph to work from as a starting point. Or I may not use photographs at all, these decisions mostly happen impulsively before I can analyze them much.

Are there any artists that you reference in your painting specifically?

There are a several paintings in my show which nod to the canon of mother and child or familial scenes in painting. Acts of combing or plaiting or drying hair has become a motif that appears across the works. Degas’ painting Combing the Hair in the National Gallery has such a particular density of hot coppery pigment which gives the tender scene a proper sense of claustrophobia. I titled The Train after a Flannery O’Connor short story. Another text that resurfaced in my mind once I’d finished the paintings for Signal was Constellations by Sinead Gleeson - in particular a chapter where she articulates her affection for her daughter's hair within a series of essays describing so accurately what it feels like to live in a body and the disconnect between the language we use to describe the sensations we feel. She splices medical descriptions of the body on a micro level with tales of her personal life. Reading that book during lockdown gave me life.