J U N C T I O N S

Islington Arts Factory is located at the tip of a junction where one road becomes two (or two, one), enclosing it on two sides, island-like, by main roads (Pankhurst Rd and Camden Rd).

Imagine the act of painting as a junction, an intersection between experience and the material topography of the world. Roisin paints from the memory of navigating urban landscapes. Maj-Gret works with the sensations of the weather, amongst other factors, and Nadja’s practice is a turning towards the materiality of the world.

If painting is a junction, then perhaps it is one that never quite measures up, two roads that nearly meet. Junctions of nearness, more miscommunication than communication. A word is a junction: we think we mean the same thing and meet at the word with confidence only to realise that we have all gone off in different directions.

The word junction comes from the Latin ‘jungere’, to join. Yet, in our experience a junction is only a temporal, impermanent joining: a brief touching down in the same place, something travelled through. (Even Camden Rd and Pankhurst Rd become two again, further down.)

How is a junction the same place for two people? Imagine travelling from Paddington to Swansea, stopping briefly at Swindon. Is the station I see the same as the one experienced by the commuter waiting there for the umpteenth time? Yet, we both, somehow, speak of the same railroad junction.

Three painters in one space, mapping junctions of proximity, mapping junctions of cross-communication, their works making a temporary topography, creating a map of potential meetings.

Nadja Gabriela Plein