Toby Paterson at Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery
Toby Paterson
Kirkcaldy museum and art gallery
Toby Paterson graduated in 1995, aged 21, with a degree in painting at the Glasgow School of Art. Toby describes himself first and foremost as a landscape painter, but one who comes at this from many directions. The urban landscape alongside place and primary experience are at the route of all he does.
He describes growing up in glasgow, a city that’s ultimately Victorian, with victorian buildings. By the 1970s so much of this Victorian landscape was demolished. Toby talks of a view out of his bedroom window growing up seeing the Boyd Orr building at Glasgow University, a mid 1960s concrete slab block. Some details of this building feature in the exhibition here at Kirkcaldy Museum. He’s both intrigued and repelled by it. He also mentions the Pinkston cooling tower too, an important part of his distant landscape growing up, which was demolished one day while he was at school. This experience in the urban environment, in particular post war modernist architecture such as this, have provided rich experiences to him and informed his practice.
Toby explores these post war structures which have been viewed as failures or have no current use, in terms of both the political manifestos and utopian ideologies and in the purely visual forms found in details. In his discussion, he talked largely about key projects and buildings in Holland and France.
He says that in his mind, he’s carrying out a sort of subjective form of town planning, presenting a mix of abstract information which can often, in actuality, be more representational than the photorealistic image. He includes his drawings of building plans in this.
The objects that make up the installation are a series of solid, big shaped plinths with digital images overlaid on them, relating to particular buildings, used as a setting to place new and existing paintings. The exhibition is a hybrid experience of a built environment with the traditionally hung works on paper and Perspex.
At Kirkcaldy, he has chosen to display both new and existing works. He picks Individual works, but combines them to create a complete composition of the space, to encourage visitors to move around the space in a specific way. He talks of a conscious attempt to play with 2d and 3d spaces, potentially overloading the viewer with visual elements and forcing psychological decisions, of how you move around the space, to be made.
One of our favourite works in the Kirkcaldy museum was the Red Tavern work in response to a kinaesthetic reaction Toby felt about the demolition of the red road flats in Glasgow.
Recently, he’s moved into using Aluminium sheets, rather than his more established medium of Perspex. He’s primarily interested in playing with 2d and 3d, often moving beyond ‘simply’ paintings. An element of Tobys work which we really enjoyed is how he plays with scale as an important subjective device. This is also something we’ve been exploring through the work of Alison Watt.
Toby says, modestly, that there are two reasons why he is here today; the first is down to Toby Webster and the Modern Institute, the second is Skateboarding. Skateboarding dictated the spaces he ended up. Both in terms of Physical experiences (falling over and bumping into things!) and visually what he was seeing around him. Both the psychicality of his paintings and the bold sculptures he makes comes from experience of forms in these spaces. How the light works in these derelict buildings in particular, and how skateboarding offers up an opportunity to find different uses for the spaces have been hugely informative to his practice. By default, he said, skateboarding encourages a different perspective on things.
Toby now likes nothing more than wandering around new places and spaces and getting lost. Photography and model making are important tools he uses for documenting his explorations of towns and cities.
His walks and Wanderings now are equivalent to the skateboarding when he was younger.
Toby’s advice to young artists is not to spend any money given to you by galleries for materials at the pub!
