Paintings From Ash

In her recent work, Gehl mixes the medium of oil with ash from burnt wood to create portraits of young women or girls. Utilising found images, the paintings are mostly comprised of missing girls- who may or may not be living now- whom appear from the physical remnants of the different grades of ash, from darkest black to palest grey.

There have always been traces of absent figures, lost souls, and ghostly presences in Gehl’s work. These paintings are a further exploration into the notion of ‘loss’ and a type of returning to portraiture, drawing on her original training in figurative and portrait painting, and also personal experiences; the final results are murky, liquid, and ghostly. The images are derived from found photographs: Victorian cabinet cards, pictures of missing persons on the internet, photographs of unidentified or unknown relatives posted on websites, and the paintings are an embodiment of something lost; they confound and subversively comment on the traditions of portraiture, its history and its banality.

The use of ash becomes almost a metaphor for what Gehl tries to exhume from these paintings, sifting through layers of ash as though sifting through mental construction of memories to reveal captured moments, not wanting them to be forgotten or consigned to the past alone.

-Trolley Gallery