Slowly We Rot
Gordon Dalton 26th September 2024 - 7th November 2024
Solastalgia is the homesickness we feel while still at home; the pain and longing we feel as we realise the environment immediately around us is changing.
Gordon Dalton’s research into solastalgia focuses on a small stretch of coast that includes places of personal importance including Runswick Bay, Staithes, Port Mulgrave, Skinningrove and ending in Middlesbrough, overlooking the UK’s first Freeport.
His work contains a slow chorographic mapping of an everchanging landscape that is shackled by its past and unsure of its future, neither here nor there. Familiar motifs and half remembered memories are buried amongst doubt, cliché, a cloud of nostalgia and the ancient and modern ruins that dot the skyline.
This coast and its communities have been shaped by natural and industrial developments, bearing both their scars and benefits. They have cohabited for so long they have become one and the same, with the looming horizon of the North Sea acting as a visual anchor.
The work in Slowly We Rot has a disinterested curiosity that is both critical and celebratory of these places. They are viewed equally with disdain and affection, reverberating
ad-infinitum between a familiar and a strange apprehension of this haunted land. The paintings act as ‘parafictions’ about place attachment. They are portals to another time in the past, present or future where a slow violence is inflicted upon these landscapes.
Dalton’s paintings want everything to be alright but are acutely aware that this is not the case. They contain the essence of these landscapes and the melancholy of longing and wanting to belong. An unfashionable romanticism grounded in the act of painting.