The Lloyd Gill Gallery: Jill Doherty

NAME Jill Doherty

Jill Tegan Doherty is a graduate from Chelsea College of Art and Design and currently a member of the ACAVA studio collective in Hackney.
In her work Jill actively engages with the surrealist tradition, her work serves as an investigation into the subconscious, in which she transposes the fleeting imagery that exists at the periphery of human imagination. Her work explores these musings making her imagery visible to the collective human consciousness. Her morphing of various species together prompts certain thought processes in the viewer, although what is culminated is an imagined form, the use of familiar subject matter forces a certain involuntary recollection. This recollection can lead to a more intense and intimate reaction to the imagery as it can trigger personal memories and allows the viewer to relate to the imagery thrust upon them.
There is an underlying haunting quality to the work, a certain hardship of social interaction and an air of confusion and entrapment. Each individual painting is riddled with subtle clues, forming suggestions to induce the mind into a certain ideation.
“I like to toy with this open-ended catalyst of deliberation in the viewer, that is, if they chose to climb deeper into the unraveling knots of the symbolism.” Jill Doherty.
Obviously Doherty likes to provoke the onlookers own subconscious with her use of unnerving imagery of disfigurement, social solitude and entrapment (perhaps in ones own mind.)
For example in ‘The Suited Bird’ as the abnormal………figure, half bird, half human, stands solitary in the corner of a bare room, staring it appears, but with the subtraction of eyes, towards the floor where its gaze meets with its shadow raising up at his feet. The shadow is sinister in presence and evoking itself upwards from the floorboards. Embedded in the mist of the shadow, however, is what appears to be an eye, suggesting perhaps the subconscious realm to be more powerful and more insightful than that of the conscious state.
The door in the background is raised above the floor, situated halfway up the wall. This generates a sense of entrapment and deception of space, the possibility of escape but perhaps not the means. Also something to note in this painting is that the proportions and perspective are not quite accurate. I feel this plays with the mind slightly, leaving you searching for the answers, which may or may not be apparent in the work.
Dipping into this strange realm in which representation and fantasy meld, this artist emerges with unsettling images of a fragile and rare beauty.

Education
Fine Art (BA HONS) – 2:1 2003 - 2006
Chelsea College of Art

Foundation Course – Merit 2002 - 2003
Kingston Upon Thames

Exhibition history
Prelude Art Fair, (9th Dec – 14th Dec 08)
Spitalfields Market, London

‘If I Were Blind I Could See’ (Solo show), (20th Nov – 30th Nov 08)
Austin Gallery
Bethnal Green Road, London

ACAVA Open Studios, (11th Oct – 12th Oct 08)
Mare Street Studios

Prelude Art Fair, (3rd Oct – 5th Oct 08)
Spitalfields Market, London

‘Surreal September’, (4th Sept – 4th Oct 08)
The Art Works Gallery
Ouseburn, Newcastle Upon Thames

The Jago Gallery, (19th Aug – 30th Aug 08)
Redchurch Street, London

Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition, (6th Jun – 17th Aug 08)
Piccadilly, London

Chaat Restaurant and Gallery, (1st May – 1st Jun 08)
Redchurch Street, London

Lolapoloza Gallery, (1st Apr – 1st May 08)
Blue Boar Street, Oxford