(Mostly Trouble)
Molly Rose Butt (b.1990) is a British painter originally from Suffolk. She lives and works on Eel Pie Island in Twickenham.
Working mostly from imagination and remembered scenes, her paintings reference her surroundings and draw upon the interactions between built and natural environments. Her work alludes to real-world spaces that are almost recognisable as landscapes or domestic spaces, but abstracted just beyond recognition through the brushwork and exploration of paint application. What appear to be architectural structures are flattened against the surface of the picture-plane, the edges of the solid forms developing and dissolving into the depths behind as the viewer’s eyes move around the work.
Objects from the everyday are adapted and repeated throughout the work to playfully manipulate and depict space, their new forms becoming motifs that stand in as characters recast from the stage of the current world into a new world that is in the process of being rewritten. The decision making is traceable through the apparent editing of the paintings, with shapes and colours visibly reworked and repositioned. The forms depicted in paint hover just above or below the surface, floating in an out of view and creating ambiguous compositions suggestive of a precarious narrative.
